way, but it was explicit enough. Francoise had come in to thank the
Countess.

"Oh! madame, then I shall owe the happiness of my life to you," she
exclaimed, bending girlishly to add in the Countess' ear, "To marry a
petty provincial attorney would be like being burned by slow fires."

It was Francis, with his knowledge of officialdom, who had prompted
Zephirine to make this set upon Louise.

"In the very earliest days after promotion," so the ex-consul-general
told his fair friend, "everybody, prefect, or monarch, or man of
business, is burning to exert his influence for his friends; but a
patron soon finds out the inconveniences of patronage, and then turns
from fire to ice. Louise will do more now for Petit-Claud than she would
do for her husband in three months' time."

"Madame la Comtesse is thinking of all that our poet's triumph entails?"
continued Petit-Claud. "She should receive Lucien before there is an end
of the nine-days' wonder."

The Countess terminated the audience with a bow, and rose to speak
with Mme. de Pimentel, who came to the boudoir. The news of old
Negrepelisse's elevation to a marquisate had greatly impressed the
Marquise; she judged it expedient to be amiable to a woman so clever as
to rise the higher for an apparent fall.

"Do tell me, dear, why you took the trouble to put your father in
the House of Peers?" said the Marquise, in the course of a little
confidential conversation, in which she bent the knee before the
superiority of "her dear Louise."

"They were all the more ready to grant the favor because my father has
no son to succeed him, dear, and his vote will always be at the disposal
of the Crown; but if we should have sons, I quite expect that my oldest
will succeed to his grandfather's name, title, and peerage."

Mme. de Pimentel saw, to her annoyance, that it was idle to expect a
mother ambitious for children not yet in existence to further her own
private designs of raising M. de Pimentel to a peerage.

"I have the Countess," Petit-Claud told Cointet when they came away. "I
can promise you your partnership. I shall be deputy prosecutor before
the month is out, and Sechard will be in your power. Try to find a buyer
for my connection; it has come to be the first in Angouleme in my hands
during the last five months----"

"Once put _you_ on the horse, and there is no need to do more," said
Cointet, half jealous of his own work.

The causes of Lucien's triumphant receptio