from one foot to another as he spoke, and half rose and sat down again when anybody spoke to him.  He seemed ready to do some menial service; he was obsequious, nervous, and grave by turns, laughing eagerly at every joke, listening with servility; and occasionally, imagining that people were laughing at him, he assumed a knowing air.  His treatise weighed upon his mind; again and again he tried to talk about silkworms; but the luckless wight happened first upon M. de Bartas, who talked music in reply, and next on M. de Saintot, who quoted Cicero to him; and not until the evening was half over did the mayor meet with sympathetic listeners in Mme. and Mlle. du Brossard, a widowed gentlewoman and her daughter.

Mme. and Mlle. du Brossard were not the least interesting persons in the clique, but their story may be told in a single phrase—­they were as poor as they were noble.  In their dress there was just that tinge of pretension which betrayed carefully hidden penury.  The daughter, a big, heavy young woman of seven-and-twenty, was supposed to be a good performer on the piano, and her mother praised her in season and out of season in the clumsiest way.  No eligible man had any taste which Camille did not share on her mother’s authoritative statement.  Mme. du Brossard, in her anxiety to establish her child, was capable of saying that her dear Camille liked nothing so much as a roving life from one garrison to another; and before the evening was out, that she was sure her dear Camille liked a quiet country farmhouse existence of all things.  Mother and daughter had the pinched sub-acid dignity characteristic of those who have learned by experience the exact value of expressions of sympathy; they belonged to a class which the world delights to pity; they had been the objects of the benevolent interest of egoism; they had sounded the empty void beneath the consoling formulas with which the world ministers to the necessities of the unfortunate.

M. de Severac was fifty-nine years old, and a childless widower.  Mother and daughter listened, therefore, with devout admiration to all that he told them about his silkworm nurseries.

“My daughter has always been fond of animals,” said the mother.  “And as women are especially interested in the silk which the little creatures produce, I shall ask permission to go over to Severac, so that my Camille may see how the silk is spun.  My Camille is so intelligent, she will grasp anything that you tell her in a moment.  Did she not understand one day the inverse ratio of the squares of distances!”

This was the remark that brought the conversation between Mme. du Brossard and M. de Severac to a glorious close after Lucien’s reading that night.