this elderly beau the superiority of the man of the world who knows Paris; and, most of all, he felt ashamed to owe his evening’s amusement to his rival.  And while the poet looked ill at ease and awkward Her Royal Highness’ ex-secretary was quite in his element.  He smiled at his rival’s hesitations, at his astonishment, at the questions he put, at the little mistakes which the latter ignorantly made, much as an old salt laughs at an apprentice who has not found his sea legs; but Lucien’s pleasure at seeing a play for the first time in Paris outweighed the annoyance of these small humiliations.

That evening marked an epoch in Lucien’s career; he put away a good many of his ideas as to provincial life in the course of it.  His horizon widened; society assumed different proportions.  There were fair Parisiennes in fresh and elegant toilettes all about him; Mme. de Bargeton’s costume, tolerably ambitious though it was, looked dowdy by comparison; the material, like the fashion and the color, was out of date.  That way of arranging her hair, so bewitching in Angouleme, looked frightfully ugly here among the daintily devised coiffures which he saw in every direction.

“Will she always look like that?” said he to himself, ignorant that the morning had been spent in preparing a transformation.

In the provinces comparison and choice are out of the question; when a face has grown familiar it comes to possess a certain beauty that is taken for granted.  But transport the pretty woman of the provinces to Paris, and no one takes the slightest notice of her; her prettiness is of the comparative degree illustrated by the saying that among the blind the one-eyed are kings.  Lucien’s eyes were now busy comparing Mme. de Bargeton with other women, just as she herself had contrasted him with Chatelet on the previous day.  And Mme. de Bargeton, on her part, permitted herself some strange reflections upon her lover.  The poet cut a poor figure notwithstanding his singular beauty.  The sleeves of his jacket were too short; with his ill-cut country gloves and a waistcoat too scanty for him, he looked prodigiously ridiculous, compared with the young men in the balcony—­“positively pitiable,” thought Mme. de Bargeton.  Chatelet, interested in her without presumption, taking care of her in a manner that revealed a profound passion; Chatelet, elegant, and as much at home as an actor treading the familiar boards of his theatre, in two days had recovered all the ground lost in the past six months.

Ordinary people will not admit that our sentiments towards each other can totally change in a moment, and yet certain it is, that two lovers not seldom fly apart even more quickly than they drew together.  In Mme. de Bargeton and in Lucien a process of disenchantment was at work; Paris was the cause.  Life had widened out before the poet’s eyes, as society came to wear a new aspect for Louise.  Nothing but an accident now was needed to sever finally the bond that united them; nor was that blow, so terrible for Lucien, very long delayed.