k, made Rochefide play, as we have seen, in
the other direction. Thankful to find a place for himself at Aurelie's
table, Couture, to whom Finot, the cleverest or, if you choose, the
luckiest of all parvenus, occasionally gave a note of a thousand francs,
was alone wise and calculating enough to offer his hand and name to
madame Schontz, who studied him to see if the bold speculator had
sufficient power to make his way in politics and enough gratitude not
to desert his wife. Couture, a man about forty-three years of age, half
worn-out, did not redeem the unpleasant sonority of his name by birth;
he said little of the authors of his days.

Madame Schontz was bemoaning to herself the rarity of eligible men, when
Couture presented to her a provincial, supplied with the two handles by
which women take hold of such pitchers when they wish to keep them. To
sketch this person will be to paint a portion of the youth of the day.
The digression is history.

In 1838, Fabien du Ronceret, son of a chief-justice of the Royal
court at Caen (who had lately died), left his native town of Alencon,
resigning his judgeship (a position in which his father had compelled
him, he said, to waste his time), and came to Paris, with the intention
of making a noise there,--a Norman idea, difficult to realize, for he
could scarcely scrape together eight thousand francs a year; his mother
still being alive and possessing a life-interest in a valuable estate
in Alencon. This young man had already, during previous visits to Paris,
tried his rope, like an acrobat, and had recognized the great vice of
the social replastering of 1830. He meant to turn it to his own profit,
following the example of the longest heads of the bourgeoisie. This
requires a rapid glance on one of the effects of the new order of
things.

Modern equality, unduly developed in our day, has necessarily developed
in private life, on a line parallel with political life, the three great
divisions of the social _I;_ namely, pride, conceit, and vanity. Fools
wish to pass for wits; wits want to be thought men of talent; men of
talent wish to be treated as men of genius; as for men of genius, they
are more reasonable; they consent to be only demigods. This tendency
of the public mind of these days, which, in the Chamber, makes the
manufacturer jealous of the statesman, and the administrator jealous
of the writer, leads fools to disparage wits, wits to disparage men of
talent, men of tale