frill, the pleatings of which puffed out my chest and were gathered
in to the knot of my cravat. When dressed in this apparel I looked so
little like myself that my sister's compliments nerved me to face
all Touraine at the ball. But it was a bold enterprise. Thanks to my
slimness I slipped into a tent set up in the gardens of the Papion
house, and found a place close to the armchair in which the duke was
seated. Instantly I was suffocated by the heat, and dazzled by the
lights, the scarlet draperies, the gilded ornaments, the dresses, and
the diamonds of the first public ball I had ever witnessed. I was pushed
hither and thither by a mass of men and women, who hustled each other in
a cloud of dust. The brazen clash of military music was drowned in the
hurrahs and acclamations of "Long live the Duc d'Angouleme! Long live
the King! Long live the Bourbons!" The ball was an outburst of pent-up
enthusiasm, where each man endeavored to outdo the rest in his fierce
haste to worship the rising sun,--an exhibition of partisan greed which
left me unmoved, or rather, it disgusted me and drove me back within
myself.

Swept onward like a straw in the whirlwind, I was seized with a childish
desire to be the Duc d'Angouleme himself, to be one of these princes
parading before an awed assemblage. This silly fancy of a Tourangean lad
roused an ambition to which my nature and the surrounding circumstances
lent dignity. Who would not envy such worship?--a magnificent repetition
of which I saw a few months later, when all Paris rushed to the feet
of the Emperor on his return from Elba. The sense of this dominion
exercised over the masses, whose feelings and whose very life are thus
merged into one soul, dedicated me then and thenceforth to glory, that
priestess who slaughters the Frenchmen of to-day as the Druidess once
sacrificed the Gauls.

Suddenly I met the woman who was destined to spur these ambitious
desires and to crown them by sending me into the heart of royalty.
Too timid to ask any one to dance,--fearing, moreover, to confuse the
figures,--I naturally became very awkward, and did not know what to
do with my arms and legs. Just as I was suffering severely from the
pressure of the crowd an officer stepped on my feet, swollen by the new
leather of my shoes as well as by the heat. This disgusted me with the
whole affair. It was impossible to get away; but I took refuge in a
corner of a room at the end of an empty bench, where I s