nd beneath his
breastplate of linen does not wear like a coat of mail the imperturbable
assurance of a boor.

All you, Parisians of Paris, who from the age of sixteen, in your first
dress-coat and with opera-hat against your thigh, have been wont to air
your adolescence at receptions of all kinds, you know nothing of that
anguish, compounded of vanity, of timidity, of recollections of romantic
readings, which keeps a young man from opening his mouth and so makes
him awkward and for a whole night pins him down to one spot in a
doorway, and converts him into a piece of furniture in a recess, a poor,
wandering and wretched being, incapable of manifesting his existence
save by an occasional change of place, dying of thirst rather than
approach the buffet, and going away without having uttered a word,
unless perhaps to stammer out one of those incoherent pieces of
foolishness which he remembers for months, and which make him, at night,
as he thinks of them, heave an "Ah!" of raging shame, with head buried
in the pillow.

Paul de Gery was that martyr. Away yonder in his country home he had
always lived a very retired existence with an old, pious, and gloomy
aunt, up to the time when the law-student, destined in the first
instance to the career in which his father had left an excellent
reputation, had found himself introduced to a few judges' drawing-rooms,
ancient, melancholy dwellings with faded pier-glasses, where he used to
go to make a fourth at whist with venerable shadows. Jenkins's evening
party was therefore a _debut_ for this provincial, of whom his very
ignorance and his southern adaptability made immediately an observer.

From the place where he stood, he watched the curious defile of
Jenkins's guests which had not yet come to an end at midnight; all the
clients of the fashionable physician; the fine flower of society;
a strong political and financial element, bankers, deputies, a few
artists, all the jaded people of Parisian "high life," wan-faced, with
glittering eyes, saturated with arsenic like greedy mice, but with
appetite insatiable for poison and for life. The drawing-room being
thrown open, the vast antechamber of which the doors had been removed to
be seen, laden with flowers at the sides, the principal staircase of the
mansion, over which swept, now shaken out to their full extent, the
long trains, whose silky weight seemed to give a backward pull to the
undraped busts of the women in the course of th