The count came to me and took my hand, saying:  “You are not angry with me, Felix, are you?  If I was hasty you will pardon an old soldier?  We shall probably stay here to dinner, and I invite you to dine with us on Thursday, the evening before the duchess leaves.  I must go to Tours to-morrow to settle some business.  Don’t neglect Clochegourde.  My mother-in-law is an acquaintance I advise you to cultivate.  Her salon will set the tone for the faubourg St. Germain.  She has all the traditions of the great world, and possesses an immense amount of social knowledge; she knows the blazon of the oldest as well as the newest family in Europe.”

The count’s good taste, or perhaps the advice of his domestic genius, appeared under his altered circumstances.  He was neither arrogant nor offensively polite, nor pompous in any way, and the duchess was not patronizing.  Monsieur and Madame de Chessel gratefully accepted the invitation to dinner on the following Thursday.  I pleased the duchess, and by her glance I knew she was examining a man of whom her daughter had spoken to her.  As we returned from vespers she questioned me about my family, and asked if the Vandenesse now in diplomacy was my relative.  “He is my brother,” I replied.  On that she became almost affectionate.  She told me that my great-aunt, the old Marquise de Listomere, was a Grandlieu.  Her manners were as cordial as those of Monsieur de Mortsauf the day he saw me for the first time; the haughty glance with which these sovereigns of the earth make you measure the distance that lies between you and them disappeared.  I knew almost nothing of my family.  The duchess told me that my great-uncle, an old abbe whose very name I did not know, was to be member of the privy council, that my brother was already promoted, and also that by a provision of the Charter, of which I had not yet heard, my father became once more Marquis de Vandenesse.

“I am but one thing, the serf of Clochegourde,” I said in a low voice to the countess.

The transformation scene of the Restoration was carried through with a rapidity which bewildered the generation brought up under the imperial regime.  To me this revolution meant nothing.  The least word or gesture from Madame de Mortsauf were the sole events to which I attached importance.  I was ignorant of what the privy council was, and knew as little of politics as of social life; my sole ambition was to love Henriette better than Petrarch loved Laura.  This indifference made the duchess take me for a child.  A large company assembled at Frapesle and we were thirty at table.  What intoxication it is for a young man unused to the world to see the woman he loves more beautiful than all others around her, the centre of admiring looks; to know that for him alone is reserved the chaste fire of those eyes, that none but he can discern in the tones of that voice, in the words it utters, however gay or jesting they may be, the proofs of unremitting thought.  The count, delighted