the tight-fitting iron-gray trousers and the overcoat with its frogs and olives clasping the waist, it seemed to him that this romantic-looking stranger, gifted with such advantages, insulted him by his superiority, just as an ugly woman feels injured by the mere sight of a pretty one.  The click of the stranger’s boot-heels offended his taste and echoed in his heart.  He felt as hampered by his own clothes (made no doubt at home out of those of his step-father) as that envied young man seemed at ease in his.

“That fellow must have heaps of francs in his trousers pocket,” thought Oscar.

The young man turned round.  What were Oscar’s feelings on beholding a gold chain round his neck, at the end of which no doubt was a gold watch!  From that moment the young man assumed, in Oscar’s eyes, the proportions of a personage.

Living in the rue de la Cerisaie since 1815, taken to and from school by his step-father, Oscar had no other points of comparison since his adolescence than the poverty-stricken household of his mother.  Brought up strictly, by Moreau’s advice, he seldom went to the theatre, and then to nothing better than the Ambigu-Comique, where his eyes could see little elegance, if indeed the eyes of a child riveted on a melodrama were likely to examine the audience.  His step-father still wore, after the fashion of the Empire, his watch in the fob of his trousers, from which there depended over his abdomen a heavy gold chain, ending in a bunch of heterogeneous ornaments, seals, and a watch-key with a round top and flat sides, on which was a landscape in mosaic.  Oscar, who considered that old-fashioned finery as the “ne plus ultra” of adornment, was bewildered by the present revelation of superior and negligent elegance.  The young man exhibited, offensively, a pair of spotless gloves, and seemed to wish to dazzle Oscar by twirling with much grace a gold-headed switch cane.

Oscar had reached that last quarter of adolescence when little things cause immense joys and immense miseries,—­a period when youth prefers misfortune to a ridiculous suit of clothes, and caring nothing for the real interests of life, torments itself about frivolities, about neckcloths, and the passionate desire to appear a man.  Then the young fellow swells himself out; his swagger is all the more portentous because it is exercised on nothings.  Yet if he envies a fool who is elegantly dressed, he is also capable of enthusiasm over talent, and of genuine admiration for genius.  Such defects as these, when they have no root in the heart, prove only the exuberance of sap,—­the richness of the youthful imagination.  That a lad of nineteen, an only child, kept severely at home by poverty, adored by a mother who put upon herself all privations for his sake, should be moved to envy by a young man of twenty-two in a frogged surtout-coat silk-lined, a waist-coat of fancy cashmere, and a cravat slipped through a ring of the worse taste, is nothing more than a peccadillo committed in all ranks of social life by inferiors who envy those that seem beyond them.  Men of genius themselves succumb to this primitive passion.  Did not Rousseau admire Ventura and Bacle?