This individual, a provincial Crevel, one of the men created to make up the crowd in the world, voted under the banner of Giraud, a State Councillor, and Victorin Hulot.  These two politicians were trying to form a nucleus of progressives in the loose array of the Conservative Party.  Giraud himself occasionally spent the evening at Madame Marneffe’s, and she flattered herself that she should also capture Victorin Hulot; but the puritanical lawyer had hitherto found excuses for refusing to accompany his father and father-in-law.  It seemed to him criminal to be seen in the house of the woman who cost his mother so many tears.  Victorin Hulot was to the puritans of political life what a pious woman is among bigots.

Beauvisage, formerly a stocking manufacturer at Arcis, was anxious to pick up the Paris style.  This man, one of the outer stones of the Chamber, was forming himself under the auspices of this delicious and fascinating Madame Marneffe.  Introduced here by Crevel, he had accepted him, at her instigation, as his model and master.  He consulted him on every point, took the address of his tailor, imitated him, and tried to strike the same attitudes.  In short, Crevel was his Great Man.

Valerie, surrounded by these bigwigs and the three artists, and supported by Lisbeth, struck Wenceslas as a really superior woman, all the more so because Claude Vignon spoke of her like a man in love.

“She is Madame de Maintenon in Ninon’s petticoats!” said the veteran critic.  “You may please her in an evening if you have the wit; but as for making her love you—­that would be a triumph to crown a man’s ambition and fill up his life.”

Valerie, while seeming cold and heedless of her former neighbor, piqued his vanity, quite unconsciously indeed, for she knew nothing of the Polish character.  There is in the Slav a childish element, as there is in all these primitively wild nations which have overflowed into civilization rather than that they have become civilized.  The race has spread like an inundation, and has covered a large portion of the globe.  It inhabits deserts whose extent is so vast that it expands at its ease; there is no jostling there, as there is in Europe, and civilization is impossible without the constant friction of minds and interests.  The Ukraine, Russia, the plains by the Danube, in short, the Slav nations, are a connecting link between Europe and Asia, between civilization and barbarism.  Thus the Pole, the wealthiest member of the Slav family, has in his character all the childishness and inconsistency of a beardless race.  He has courage, spirit, and strength; but, cursed with instability, that courage, strength, and energy have neither method nor guidance; for the Pole displays a variability resembling that of the winds which blow across that vast plain broken with swamps; and though he has the impetuosity of the snow squalls that wrench and sweep away buildings, like those aerial avalanches he is lost in the first pool and melts into water.  Man always assimilates something from the surroundings in which he lives.  Perpetually at strife with the Turk, the Pole has imbibed a taste for Oriental splendor; he often sacrifices what is needful for the sake of display.  The men dress themselves out like women, yet the climate has given them the tough constitution of Arabs.