d as a cousin
through the Popinots. Then she persuaded an old friend of the departed
Madame Lousteau to stir up the journalist's ambitions by letting him
know that certain persons in Sancerre were firmly bent on electing a
deputy from among the distinguished men in Paris.

Tired of her commonplace neighbors, Madame de la Baudraye would thus at
last meet really illustrious men, and might give her fall the lustre of
fame.

Neither Lousteau nor Bianchon replied; they were waiting perhaps till
the holidays. Bianchon, who had won his professor's chair the year
before after a brilliant contest, could not leave his lectures.

In the month of September, when the vintage was at its height, the two
Parisians arrived in their native province, and found it absorbed in the
unremitting toil of the wine-crop of 1836; there could therefore be
no public demonstration in their favor. "We have fallen flat," said
Lousteau to his companion, in the slang of the stage.

In 1836, Lousteau, worn by sixteen years of struggle in the Capital,
and aged quite as much by pleasure as by penury, hard work, and
disappointments, looked eight-and-forty, though he was no more than
thirty-seven. He was already bald, and had assumed a Byronic air in
harmony with his early decay and the lines furrowed in his face
by over-indulgence in champagne. He ascribed these signs-manual of
dissipation to the severities of a literary life, declaring that the
Press was murderous; and he gave it to be understood that it consumed
superior talents, so as to lend a grace to his exhaustion. In his native
town he thought proper to exaggerate his affected contempt of life and
his spurious misanthropy. Still, his eyes could flash with fire like
a volcano supposed to be extinct, and he endeavored, by dressing
fashionably, to make up for the lack of youth that might strike a
woman's eye.

Horace Bianchon, who wore the ribbon of the Legion of Honor, was fat and
burly, as beseems a fashionable physician, with a patriarchal air, his
hair thick and long, a prominent brow, the frame of a hard worker, and
the calm expression of a philosopher. This somewhat prosaic personality
set off his more frivolous companion to advantage.

The two great men remained unrecognized during a whole morning at the
inn where they had put up, and it was only by chance that Monsieur de
Clagny heard of their arrival. Madame de la Baudraye, in despair at
this, despatched Gatien Boirouge, who had no v