overlooked by the shortsighted Emperor, made much of Lucien, and declared himself his friend!  To launch the poet into society, he gave a dinner, and asked all the authorities to meet him—­the prefect, the receiver-general, the colonel in command of the garrison, the head of the Naval School, the president of the Court, and so forth.  The poet, poor fellow, was feted so magnificently, and so belauded, that anybody but a young man of two-and-twenty would have shrewdly suspected a hoax.  After dinner, Chatelet drew his rival on to recite The Dying Sardanapalus, the masterpiece of the hour; and the headmaster of the school, a man of a phlegmatic temperament, applauded with both hands, and vowed that Jean-Baptiste Rousseau had done nothing finer.  Sixte, Baron du Chatelet, thought in his heart that this slip of a rhymster would wither incontinently in a hothouse of adulation; perhaps he hoped that when the poet’s head was turned with brilliant dreams, he would indulge in some impertinence that would promptly consign him to the obscurity from which he had emerged.  Pending the decease of genius, Chatelet appeared to offer up his hopes as a sacrifice at Mme. de Bargeton’s feet; but with the ingenuity of a rake, he kept his own plan in abeyance, watching the lovers’ movements with keenly critical eyes, and waiting for the opportunity of ruining Lucien.

From this time forward, vague rumors reported the existence of a great man in Angoumois.  Mme. de Bargeton was praised on all sides for the interest which she took in this young eagle.  No sooner was her conduct approved than she tried to win a general sanction.  She announced a soiree, with ices, tea, and cakes, a great innovation in a city where tea, as yet, was sold only by druggists as a remedy for indigestion.  The flower of Angoumoisin aristocracy was summoned to hear Lucien read his great work.  Louise had hidden all the difficulties from her friend, but she let fall a few words touching the social cabal formed against him; she would not have him ignorant of the perils besetting his career as a man of genius, nor of the obstacles insurmountable to weaklings.  She drew a lesson from the recent victory.  Her white hands pointed him to glory that lay beyond a prolonged martyrdom; she spoke of stakes and flaming pyres; she spread the adjectives thickly on her finest tartines, and decorated them with a variety of her most pompous epithets.  It was an infringement of the copyright of the passages of declamation that disfigure Corinne; but Louise grew so much the greater in her own eyes as she talked, that she loved the Benjamin who inspired her eloquence the more for it.  She counseled him to take a bold step and renounce his patronymic for the noble name of Rubempre; he need not mind the little tittle-tattle over a change which the King, for that matter, would authorize.  Mme. de Bargeton undertook to procure this favor; she was related to the Marquise d’Espard, who was a Blamont-Chauvry before her marriage, and a persona grata at Court.  The words “King,” “Marquise d’Espard,” and “the Court” dazzled Lucien like a blaze of fireworks, and the necessity of the baptism was plain to him.