r epoch by their Christian names; he is on the best of terms with
the blue stockings of the second grade,--who ought to be called
_socks_,--and he shakes hands and takes glasses of absinthe with the
stars of the smaller newspapers.

Such is the history of every species of ordinary men--men who have
been denied what they call good luck. This good luck is nothing less
than unyielding will, incessant labor, contempt for an easily won
celebrity, immense learning, and that patience which, according to
Buffon, is the whole of genius, but which certainly is the half of it.

You do not yet see any indication of a petty trouble for Caroline. You
imagine that this history of five hundred young men engaged at this
moment in wearing smooth the paving stones of Paris, was written as a
sort of warning to the families of the eighty-six departments of
France: but read these two letters which lately passed between two
girls differently married, and you will see that it was as necessary
as the narrative by which every true melodrama was until lately
expected to open. You will divine the skillful manoeuvres of the
Parisian peacock spreading his tail in the recesses of his native
village, and polishing up, for matrimonial purposes, the rays of his
glory, which, like those of the sun, are only warm and brilliant at a
distance.

From Madame Claire de la Roulandiere, nee Jugault, to Madame Adolphe
de Chodoreille, nee Heurtaut.

"VIVIERS.

"You have not yet written to me, and it's real unkind in you. Don't
you remember that the happier was to write first and to console her
who remained in the country?

"Since your departure for Paris, I have married Monsieur de la
Roulandiere, the president of the tribunal. You know him, and you can
judge whether I am happy or not, with my heart _saturated_, as it is,
with our ideas. I was not ignorant what my lot would be: I live with
the ex-president, my husband's uncle, and with my mother-in-law, who
has preserved nothing of the ancient parliamentary society of Aix but
its pride and its severity of manners. I am seldom alone, I never go
out unless accompanied by my mother-in-law or my husband. We receive
the heavy people of the city in the evening. They play whist at two
sous a point, and I listen to conversations of this nature:

"'Monsieur Vitremont is dead, and leaves two hundred and eighty
thousand francs,' says the associate judge, a young man of
forty-seven, who is as entertaining as a nort