t the need of
the support of public opinion, and was glad to take the Marquis' place
and give her countenance to one of her husband's relations. She meant to
be ostentatiously gracious, so as to put her husband more evidently
in the wrong; and that very day she wrote, "Mme. de Bargeton _nee_
Negrepelisse" a charming billet, one of the prettily worded compositions
of which time alone can discover the emptiness.

"She was delighted that circumstances had brought a relative, of whom
she had heard, whose acquaintance she had desired to make, into closer
connection with her family. Friendships in Paris were not so solid but
that she longed to find one more to love on earth; and if this might not
be, there would only be one more illusion to bury with the rest. She put
herself entirely at her cousin's disposal. She would have called upon
her if indisposition had not kept her to the house, and she felt that
she lay already under obligations to the cousin who had thought of her."

Lucien, meanwhile, taking his first ramble along the Rue de la Paix and
through the Boulevards, like all newcomers, was much more interested in
the things that he saw than in the people he met. The general effect of
Paris is wholly engrossing at first. The wealth in the shop windows, the
high houses, the streams of traffic, the contrast everywhere between the
last extremes of luxury and want struck him more than anything else. In
his astonishment at the crowds of strange faces, the man of imaginative
temper felt as if he himself had shrunk, as it were, immensely. A man of
any consequence in his native place, where he cannot go out but he meets
with some recognition of his importance at every step, does not readily
accustom himself to the sudden and total extinction of his consequence.
You are somebody in your own country, in Paris you are nobody.
The transition between the first state and the last should be made
gradually, for the too abrupt fall is something like annihilation.
Paris could not fail to be an appalling wilderness for a young poet,
who looked for an echo for all his sentiments, a confidant for all his
thoughts, a soul to share his least sensations.

Lucien had not gone in search of his luggage and his best blue coat; and
painfully conscious of the shabbiness, to say no worse, of his clothes,
he went to Mme. de Bargeton, feeling that she must have returned. He
found the Baron du Chatelet, who carried them both off to dinner at the
_R