A singular chance so ordered it that the Marquise was delighted to find an opportunity of being useful to a connection of her husband's family.The Marquis d'Espard had withdrawn himself without apparent reason from society,and ceased to take any active interest in affairs,political or domestic.His wife,thus left mistress of her actions,felt the need of the support of public opinion,and was glad to take the Marquis'place and give her countenance to one of her husband's relations.She meant to be ostentatiously gracious,so as to put her husband more evidently in the wrong;and that very day she wrote,"Mme.de Bargeton nee Negrepelisse"a charming billet,one of the prettily worded compositions of which time alone can discover the emptiness.
"She was delighted that circumstances had brought a relative,of whom she had heard,whose acquaintance she had desired to make,into closer connection with her family.Friendships in Paris were not so solid but that she longed to find one more to love on earth;and if this might not be,there would only be one more illusion to bury with the rest.
She put herself entirely at her cousin's disposal.She would have called upon her if indisposition had not kept her to the house,and she felt that she lay already under obligations to the cousin who had thought of her."Lucien,meanwhile,taking his first ramble along the Rue de la Paix and through the Boulevards,like all newcomers,was much more interested in the things that he saw than in the people he met.The general effect of Paris is wholly engrossing at first.The wealth in the shop windows,the high houses,the streams of traffic,the contrast everywhere between the last extremes of luxury and want struck him more than anything else.In his astonishment at the crowds of strange faces,the man of imaginative temper felt as if he himself had shrunk,as it were,immensely.A man of any consequence in his native place,where he cannot go out but he meets with some recognition of his importance at every step,does not readily accustom himself to the sudden and total extinction of his consequence.You are somebody in your own country,in Paris you are nobody.The transition between the first state and the last should be made gradually,for the too abrupt fall is something like annihilation.Paris could not fail to be an appalling wilderness for a young poet,who looked for an echo for all his sentiments,a confidant for all his thoughts,a soul to share his least sensations.
Lucien had not gone in search of his luggage and his best blue coat;and painfully conscious of the shabbiness,to say no worse,of his clothes,he went to Mme.de Bargeton,feeling that she must have returned.He found the Baron du Chatelet,who carried them both off to dinner at the Rocher de Cancale.Lucien's head was dizzy with the whirl of Paris,the Baron was in the carriage,he could say nothing to Louise,but he squeezed her hand,and she gave a warm response to the mute confidence.
After dinner Chatelet took his guests to the Vaudeville.Lucien,in his heart,was not over well pleased to see Chatelet again,and cursed the chance that had brought the Baron to Paris.The Baron said that ambition had brought him to town;he had hopes of an appointment as secretary-general to a government department,and meant to take a seat in the Council of State as Master of Requests.He had come to Paris to ask for fulfilment of the promises that had been given him,for a man of his stamp could not be expected to remain a comptroller all his life;he would rather be nothing at all,and offer himself for election as deputy,or re-enter diplomacy.Chatelet grew visibly taller;Lucien dimly began to recognize in this elderly beau the superiority of the man of the world who knows Paris;and,most of all,he felt ashamed to owe his evening's amusement to his rival.And while the poet looked ill at ease and awkward Her Royal Highness'ex-secretary was quite in his element.He smiled at his rival's hesitations,at his astonishment,at the questions he put,at the little mistakes which the latter ignorantly made,much as an old salt laughs at an apprentice who has not found his sea legs;but Lucien's pleasure at seeing a play for the first time in Paris outweighed the annoyance of these small humiliations.
That evening marked an epoch in Lucien's career;he put away a good many of his ideas as to provincial life in the course of it.His horizon widened;society assumed different proportions.There were fair Parisiennes in fresh and elegant toilettes all about him;Mme.de Bargeton's costume,tolerably ambitious though it was,looked dowdy by comparison;the material,like the fashion and the color,was out of date.That way of arranging her hair,so bewitching in Angouleme,looked frightfully ugly here among the daintily devised coiffures which he saw in every direction.
"Will she always look like that?"said he to himself,ignorant that the morning had been spent in preparing a transformation.
