is step-father, had his black hair cut like a clothes-brush
across the forehead, and clipped, like a soldier's, close to the head.
The face of the vain lad was round and chubby and bright with the hues
of health, while that of his fellow-traveller was long, and delicate,
and pale. The forehead of the latter was broad, and his chest filled
out a waistcoat of cashmere pattern. As Oscar admired the tight-fitting
iron-gray trousers and the overcoat with its frogs and olives clasping
the waist, it seemed to him that this romantic-looking stranger, gifted
with such advantages, insulted him by his superiority, just as an ugly
woman feels injured by the mere sight of a pretty one. The click of the
stranger's boot-heels offended his taste and echoed in his heart. He
felt as hampered by his own clothes (made no doubt at home out of those
of his step-father) as that envied young man seemed at ease in his.

"That fellow must have heaps of francs in his trousers pocket," thought
Oscar.

The young man turned round. What were Oscar's feelings on beholding
a gold chain round his neck, at the end of which no doubt was a gold
watch! From that moment the young man assumed, in Oscar's eyes, the
proportions of a personage.

Living in the rue de la Cerisaie since 1815, taken to and from school
by his step-father, Oscar had no other points of comparison since his
adolescence than the poverty-stricken household of his mother. Brought
up strictly, by Moreau's advice, he seldom went to the theatre, and
then to nothing better than the Ambigu-Comique, where his eyes could see
little elegance, if indeed the eyes of a child riveted on a melodrama
were likely to examine the audience. His step-father still wore, after
the fashion of the Empire, his watch in the fob of his trousers, from
which there depended over his abdomen a heavy gold chain, ending in a
bunch of heterogeneous ornaments, seals, and a watch-key with a round
top and flat sides, on which was a landscape in mosaic. Oscar,
who considered that old-fashioned finery as the "ne plus ultra" of
adornment, was bewildered by the present revelation of superior and
negligent elegance. The young man exhibited, offensively, a pair of
spotless gloves, and seemed to wish to dazzle Oscar by twirling with
much grace a gold-headed switch cane.

Oscar had reached that last quarter of adolescence when little things
cause immense joys and immense miseries,--a period when youth prefers
misfortune to a rid