ocher de Cancale_. Lucien's head was dizzy with the whirl of Paris,
the Baron was in the carriage, he could say nothing to Louise, but he
squeezed her hand, and she gave a warm response to the mute confidence.

After dinner Chatelet took his guests to the Vaudeville. Lucien, in his
heart, was not over well pleased to see Chatelet again, and cursed the
chance that had brought the Baron to Paris. The Baron said that
ambition had brought him to town; he had hopes of an appointment as
secretary-general to a government department, and meant to take a seat
in the Council of State as Master of Requests. He had come to Paris to
ask for fulfilment of the promises that had been given him, for a man of
his stamp could not be expected to remain a comptroller all his life;
he would rather be nothing at all, and offer himself for election as
deputy, or re-enter diplomacy. Chatelet grew visibly taller; Lucien
dimly began to recognize in this elderly beau the superiority of the man
of the world who knows Paris; and, most of all, he felt ashamed to owe
his evening's amusement to his rival. And while the poet looked ill
at ease and awkward Her Royal Highness' ex-secretary was quite in his
element. He smiled at his rival's hesitations, at his astonishment, at
the questions he put, at the little mistakes which the latter ignorantly
made, much as an old salt laughs at an apprentice who has not found his
sea legs; but Lucien's pleasure at seeing a play for the first time in
Paris outweighed the annoyance of these small humiliations.

That evening marked an epoch in Lucien's career; he put away a good
many of his ideas as to provincial life in the course of it. His
horizon widened; society assumed different proportions. There were
fair Parisiennes in fresh and elegant toilettes all about him; Mme. de
Bargeton's costume, tolerably ambitious though it was, looked dowdy by
comparison; the material, like the fashion and the color, was out of
date. That way of arranging her hair, so bewitching in Angouleme, looked
frightfully ugly here among the daintily devised coiffures which he saw
in every direction.

"Will she always look like that?" said he to himself, ignorant that the
morning had been spent in preparing a transformation.

In the provinces comparison and choice are out of the question; when
a face has grown familiar it comes to possess a certain beauty that is
taken for granted. But transport the pretty woman of the provinces to
Paris, a