clergy.  He encouraged the queen of Angouleme in foibles bred of the soil; he brought her all the newest books; he read aloud the poetry that appeared.  Together they went into ecstasies over these poets; she in all sincerity, he with suppressed yawns; but he bore with the Romantics with a patience hardly to be expected of a man of the Imperial school, who scarcely could make out what the young writers meant.  Not so Mme. de Bargeton; she waxed enthusiastic over the renaissance, due to the return of the Bourbon Lilies; she loved M. de Chateaubriand for calling Victor Hugo “a sublime child.”  It depressed her that she could only know genius from afar, she sighed for Paris, where great men live.  For these reasons M. du Chatelet thought he had done a wonderfully clever thing when he told the lady that at that moment in Angouleme there was “another sublime child,” a young poet, a rising star whose glory surpassed the whole Parisian galaxy, though he knew it not.  A great man of the future had been born in L’Houmeau!  The headmaster of the school had shown the Baron some admirable verses.  The poor and humble lad was a second Chatterton, with none of the political baseness and ferocious hatred of the great ones of earth that led his English prototype to turn pamphleteer and revile his benefactors.  Mme. de Bargeton in her little circle of five or six persons, who were supposed to share her tastes for art and letters, because this one scraped a fiddle, and that splashed sheets of white paper, more or less, with sepia, and the other was president of a local agricultural society, or was gifted with a bass voice that rendered Se fiato in corpo like a war whoop —­Mme. de Bargeton amid these grotesque figures was like a famished actor set down to a stage dinner of pasteboard.  No words, therefore, can describe her joy at these tidings.  She must see this poet, this angel!  She raved about him, went into raptures, talked of him for whole hours together.  Before two days were out the sometime diplomatic courier had negotiated (through the headmaster) for Lucien’s appearance in the Hotel de Bargeton.

Poor helots of the provinces, for whom the distances between class and class are so far greater than for the Parisian (for whom, indeed, these distances visibly lessen day by day); souls so grievously oppressed by the social barriers behind which all sorts and conditions of men sit crying Raca! with mutual anathemas—­you, and you alone, will fully comprehend the ferment in Lucien’s heart and brain, when his awe-inspiring headmaster told him that the great gates of the Hotel de Bargeton would shortly open and turn upon their hinges at his fame!  Lucien and David, walking together of an evening in the Promenade de Beaulieu, had looked up at the house with the old-fashioned gables, and wondered whether their names would ever so much as reach ears inexorably deaf to knowledge that came from a lowly origin; and now he (Lucien) was to be made welcome there!