“Heaven send that Lucien might meet with better treatment than he had done,” such was the matter of M. du Chatelet’s discourse.  “The Court was less insolent that this pack of dolts in Angouleme.  You were expected to endure deadly insults; the superciliousness you had to put up with was something abominable.  If this kind 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 him beyond measure, but she represented him to himself as a child without fortune whom she meant to start in life; she treated him like a child, to keep him near her; she made him her reader, her secretary, and cared more for him than she would have thought possible after the dreadful calamity that had befallen her.