and much of
his poetry, thought him a handsome man, with his blue eyes, and their
ardent, melancholy glance; and they applauded him as much as they
could without bursting their very tight gloves. They surrounded him and
complimented him. Madame Fontaine presented him to the poet Leroy des
Saules, who congratulated him with the right word, and invited him with
a paternal air to come and see him. It would have been a very happy
moment for Amedee, if one of the old maids with camel-like lips, whose
stockings were probably as blue as her eyelids, had not monopolized him
for a quarter of an hour, putting him through a sort of an examination
on contemporary poets. At last the poet retired, after receiving a cup
of tea and an invitation to dinner for the next Tuesday. Then he was
once more seated in the carriage with Arthur Papillon, who gave him a
slap on the thigh, exclaiming, joyfully:

"Well, you are launched!"

It was true; he was launched, and he will wear out more than one suit
of evening clothes before he learns all that this action "going into
society," which seems nothing at all at first, and which really is
nothing, implies, to an industrious man and artist, of useless activity
and lost time. He is launched! He has made a successful debut! A dinner
in the city! At Madame Fontaine's dinner on the next Tuesday, some
abominable wine and aged salmon was served to Amedee by a butler named
Adolphe, who ought rather to have been called Exili or Castaing, and
who, after fifteen years' service to the Countess, already owned two
good paying houses in Paris. At the time, however, all went well,
for Amedee had a good healthy stomach and could digest buttons from
a uniform; but when all the Borgias, in black-silk stockings and
white-silk gloves, who wish to become house-owners, have cooked their
favorite dishes for him, and have practised only half a dozen winters,
two or three times a week upon him, we shall know more as to his
digestion. Still that dinner was enjoyable. Beginning with the
suspicious salmon, the statesman with the brush-broom head, the one who
had overthrown Louis-Philippe without suspecting it, started to explain
how, if they had listened to his advice, this constitutional king's
dynasty would yet be upon the throne; and at the moment when the
wretched butler poured out his most poisonous wine, the old lady
who looked like a dromedary with rings in its ears, made Amedee--her
unfortunate neighbor--undergo a n