Madame
Charlotte, the monthly nurse, was no other than Mme. Chardon, "the
mother of the Chateaubriand of L'Houmeau," as he put it. The remark
passed muster as a joke. Mme. de Chandour was the first to hurry to Mme.
de Bargeton.

"Nais, dear," she said, "do you know what everybody is talking about
in Angouleme? This little rhymster's mother is the Madame Charlotte who
nursed my sister-in-law through her confinement two months ago."

"What is there extraordinary in that, my dear?" asked Mme. de Bargeton
with her most regal air. "She is a druggist's widow, is she not? A
poor fate for a Rubempre. Suppose that you and I had not a penny in the
world, what should either of us do for a living? How would you support
your children?"

Mme. de Bargeton's presence of mind put an end to the jeremiads of the
_noblesse_. Great natures are prone to make a virtue of misfortune;
and there is something irresistibly attractive about well-doing when
persisted in through evil report; innocence has the piquancy of the
forbidden.

Mme. de Bargeton's rooms were crowded that evening with friends who came
to remonstrate with her. She brought her most caustic wit into play.
She said that as noble families could not produce a Moliere, a Racine, a
Rousseau, a Voltaire, a Massillon, a Beaumarchais, or a Diderot, people
must make up their minds to it, and accept the fact that great men had
upholsterers and clockmakers and cutlers for their fathers. She
said that genius was always noble. She railed at boorish squires for
understanding their real interests so imperfectly. In short, she talked
a good deal of nonsense, which would have let the light into heads less
dense, but left her audience agape at her eccentricity. And in these
ways she conjured away the storm with her heavy artillery.

When Lucien, obedient to her request, appeared for the first time in
the faded great drawing-room, where the whist-tables were set out, she
welcomed him graciously, and brought him forward, like a queen who means
to be obeyed. She addressed the controller of excise as "M. Chatelet,"
and left that gentleman thunderstruck by the discovery that she knew
about the illegal superfetation of the particle. Lucien was forced upon
her circle, and was received as a poisonous element, which every person
in it vowed to expel with the antidote of insolence.

Nais had won a victory, but she had lost her supremacy of empire.
There was a rumor of insurrection. Amelie, otherwise