In a moment the semi-disinherited son had become a personage!  I was more dumfounded by my importance than by the deluge of ironical reasoning with which my mother received my request.  I questioned my sisters, and then discovered that my mother, who liked such theatrical plots, was already attending to my clothes.  The tailors in Tours were fully occupied by the sudden demands of their regular customers, and my mother was forced to employ her usual seamstress, who—­according to provincial custom—­could do all kinds of sewing.  A bottle-blue coat had been secretly made for me, after a fashion, and silk stockings and pumps provided; waistcoats were then worn short, so that I could wear one of my father’s; and for the first time in my life I had a shirt with a frill, the pleatings of which puffed out my chest and were gathered in to the knot of my cravat.  When dressed in this apparel I looked so little like myself that my sister’s compliments nerved me to face all Touraine at the ball.  But it was a bold enterprise.  Thanks to my slimness I slipped into a tent set up in the gardens of the Papion house, and found a place close to the armchair in which the duke was seated.  Instantly I was suffocated by the heat, and dazzled by the lights, the scarlet draperies, the gilded ornaments, the dresses, and the diamonds of the first public ball I had ever witnessed.  I was pushed hither and thither by a mass of men and women, who hustled each other in a cloud of dust.  The brazen clash of military music was drowned in the hurrahs and acclamations of “Long live the Duc d’Angouleme!  Long live the King!  Long live the Bourbons!” The ball was an outburst of pent-up enthusiasm, where each man endeavored to outdo the rest in his fierce haste to worship the rising sun,—­an exhibition of partisan greed which left me unmoved, or rather, it disgusted me and drove me back within myself.

Swept onward like a straw in the whirlwind, I was seized with a childish desire to be the Duc d’Angouleme himself, to be one of these princes parading before an awed assemblage.  This silly fancy of a Tourangean lad roused an ambition to which my nature and the surrounding circumstances lent dignity.  Who would not envy such worship?—­a magnificent repetition of which I saw a few months later, when all Paris rushed to the feet of the Emperor on his return from Elba.  The sense of this dominion exercised over the masses, whose feelings and whose very life are thus merged into one soul, dedicated me then and thenceforth to glory, that priestess who slaughters the Frenchmen of to-day as the Druidess once sacrificed the Gauls.

Suddenly I met the woman who was destined to spur these ambitious desires and to crown them by sending me into the heart of royalty.  Too timid to ask any one to dance,—­fearing, moreover, to confuse the figures,—­I naturally became very awkward, and did not know what to do with my arms and legs.  Just as I was suffering severely from the pressure of the crowd an officer stepped