l be one of the most
entertaining productions of our epoch."

After eleven years, Chodoreille is regarded as having written some
respectable things, five or six tales published in the dismal magazines,
in ladies' newspapers, or in works intended for children of tender age.

As he is a bachelor, and possesses a coat and a pair of black cassimere
trousers, and when he pleases may thus assume the appearance of an
elegant diplomat, and as he is not without a certain intelligent air, he
is admitted to several more or less literary salons: he bows to the five
or six academicians who possess genius, influence or talent, he visits
two or three of our great poets, he allows himself, in coffee-rooms,
to call the two or three justly celebrated women of our 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