This beginning of a collection was all the more precious to Dinah because she was the only person for ten leagues round who owned an album.  Within the last two years, however, several young ladies had acquired such books, in which they made their friends and acquaintances write more or less absurd quotations or sentiments.  You who spend your lives in collecting autographs, simple and happy souls, like Dutch tulip fanciers, you will excuse Dinah when, in her fear of not keeping her guests more than two days, she begged Bianchon to enrich the volume she handed to him with a few lines of his writing.

The doctor made Lousteau smile by showing him this sentence on the first page: 

  “What makes the populace dangerous is that it has in its pocket an
  absolution for every crime.

J. B. DE CLAGNY.”

“We will second the man who is brave enough to plead in favor of the Monarchy,” Desplein’s great pupil whispered to Lousteau, and he wrote below: 

  “The distinction between Napoleon and a water-carrier is evident
  only to Society; Nature takes no account of it.  Thus Democracy,
  which resists inequality, constantly appeals to Nature.

H. BIANCHON.”

“Ah!” cried Dinah, amazed, “you rich men take a gold piece out of your purse as poor men bring out a farthing. . . .  I do not know,” she went on, turning to Lousteau, “whether it is taking an unfair advantage of a guest to hope for a few lines—­”

“Nay, madame, you flatter me.  Bianchon is a great man, but I am too insignificant!—­Twenty years hence my name will be more difficult to identify than that of the Public Prosecutor whose axiom, written in your album, will designate him as an obscurer Montesquieu.  And I should want at least twenty-four hours to improvise some sufficiently bitter reflections, for I could only describe what I feel.”

“I wish you needed a fortnight,” said Madame de la Baudraye graciously, as she handed him the book.  “I should keep you here all the longer.”

At five next morning all the party in the Chateau d’Anzy were astir, little La Baudraye having arranged a day’s sport for the Parisians —­less for their pleasure than to gratify his own conceit.  He was delighted to make them walk over the twelve hundred acres of waste land that he was intending to reclaim, an undertaking that would cost some hundred thousand francs, but which might yield an increase of thirty to sixty thousand francs a year in the returns of the estate of Anzy.

“Do you know why the Public Prosecutor has not come out with us?” asked Gatien Boirouge of Monsieur Gravier.

“Why he told us that he was obliged to sit to-day; the minor cases are before the Court,” replied the other.

“And did you believe that?” cried Gatien.  “Well, my papa said to me, ’Monsieur Lebas will not join you early, for Monsieur de Clagny has begged him as his deputy to sit for him!’”