ind of folk did not alter their behavior,
there would be another Revolution of '89. As for himself, if he
continued to go to the house, it was because he had found Mme. de
Bargeton to his taste; she was the only woman worth troubling about in
Angouleme; he had been paying court to her for want of anything better
to do, and now he was desperately in love with her. She would be his
before very long, she loved him, everything pointed that way. The
conquest of this haughty queen of the society would be his one revenge
on the whole houseful of booby clodpates."

Chatelet talked of his passion in the tone of a man who would have a
rival's life if he crossed his path. The elderly butterfly of the Empire
came down with his whole weight on the poor poet, and tried to frighten
and crush him by his self-importance. He grew taller as he gave an
embellished account of his perilous wanderings; but while he impressed
the poet's imagination, the lover was by no means afraid of him.

In spite of the elderly coxcomb, and regardless of his threats and
airs of a _bourgeois_ bravo, Lucien went back again and again to the
house--not too often at first, as became a man of L'Houmeau; but before
very long he grew accustomed to the vast condescension, as it had seemed
to him at the outset, and came more and more frequently. The druggist's
son was a completely insignificant being. If any of the _noblesse_, men
or women, calling upon Nais, found Lucien in the room, they met him with
the overwhelming graciousness that well-bred people use towards their
inferiors. Lucien thought them very kind for a time, and later found out
the real reason for their specious amiability. It was not long before he
detected a patronizing tone that stirred his gall and confirmed him
in his bitter Republicanism, a phase of opinion through which many
a would-be patrician passes by way of prelude to his introduction to
polite society.

But was there anything that he would not have endured for Nais?--for
so he heard her named by the clan. Like Spanish grandees and the old
Austrian nobility at Vienna, these folk, men and women alike, called
each other by their Christian names, a final shade of distinction in the
inmost ring of Angoumoisin aristocracy.

Lucien loved Nais as a young man loves the first woman who flatters him,
for Nais prophesied great things and boundless fame for Lucien. She used
all her skill to secure her hold upon her poet; not merely did she
exalt hi