At the age of eighteen, Victurnien went into society.  He noticed some slight discrepancies between the outer world of the town and the inner world of the Hotel d’Esgrignon, but he in no wise tried to seek the causes of them.  And, indeed, the causes were to be found in Paris.  He had yet to learn that the men who spoke their minds out so boldly in evening talk with his father, were extremely careful of what they said in the presence of the hostile persons with whom their interests compelled them to mingle.  His own father had won the right of freedom of speech.  Nobody dreamed of contradicting an old man of seventy, and besides, every one was willing to overlook fidelity to the old order of things in a man who had been violently despoiled.

Victurnien was deceived by appearances, and his behavior set up the backs of the townspeople.  In his impetuous way he tried to carry matters with too high a hand over some difficulties in the way of sport, which ended in formidable lawsuits, hushed up by Chesnel for money paid down.  Nobody dared to tell the Marquis of these things.  You may judge of his astonishment if he had heard that his son had been prosecuted for shooting over his lands, his domains, his covers, under the reign of a son of St. Louis!  People were too much afraid of the possible consequences to tell him about such trifles, Chesnel said.

The young Count indulged in other escapades in the town.  These the Chevalier regarded as “amourettes,” but they cost Chesnel something considerable in portions for forsaken damsels seduced under imprudent promises of marriage:  yet other cases there were which came under an article of the Code as to the abduction of minors; and but for Chesnel’s timely intervention, the new law would have been allowed to take its brutal course, and it is hard to say where the Count might have ended.  Victurnien grew the bolder for these victories over bourgeois justice.  He was so accustomed to be pulled out of scrapes, that he never thought twice before any prank.  Courts of law, in his opinion, were bugbears to frighten people who had no hold on him.  Things which he would have blamed in common people were for him only pardonable amusements.  His disposition to treat the new laws cavalierly while obeying the maxims of a Code for aristocrats, his behavior and character, were all pondered, analyzed, and tested by a few adroit persons in du Croisier’s interests.  These folk supported each other in the effort to make the people believe that Liberal slanders were revelations, and that the Ministerial policy at bottom meant a return to the old order of things.