Edouard Riviere was an adept at this sort of task, and soon handed him a neat analysis.  Raynal ran his eye over it, nodded cold approval, and told him to take this for the present as a guide as to his own duties.  He then pointed to a map on which Riviere’s district was marked in blue ink, and bade him find the centre of it.  Edouard took a pair of compasses off the table, and soon discovered that the village of Beaurepaire was his centre.  “Then quarter yourself at Beaurepaire; and good-day,” said Raynal.

The chateau was in sight from Riviere’s quarters, and he soon learned that it belonged to a royalist widow and her daughters, who all three held themselves quite aloof from the rest of the world.  “Ah,” said the young citizen, “I see.  If these rococo citizens play that game with me, I shall have to take them down.”  Thus a fresh peril menaced this family, on whose hearts and fortunes such heavy blows had fallen.

One evening our young official, after a day spent in the service of the country, deigned to take a little stroll to relieve the cares of administration.  He imprinted on his beardless face the expression of a wearied statesman, and strolled through an admiring village.  The men pretended veneration from policy; the women, whose views of this great man were shallower but more sincere, smiled approval of his airs; and the young puppy affected to take no notice of either sex.

Outside the village, Publicola suddenly encountered two young ladies, who resembled nothing he had hitherto met with in his district; they were dressed in black, and with extreme simplicity; but their easy grace and composure, and the refined sentiment of their gentle faces, told at a glance they belonged to the high nobility.  Publicola divined them at once, and involuntarily raised his hat to so much beauty and dignity, instead of poking it with a finger as usual.  On this the ladies instantly courtesied to him after the manner of their party, with a sweep and a majesty, and a precision of politeness, that the pup would have laughed at if he had heard of it; but seeing it done, and well done, and by lovely women of rank, he was taken aback by it, and lifted his hat again, and bowed again after he had gone by, and was generally flustered.  In short, instead of a member of the Consular Government saluting private individuals of a decayed party that existed only by sufferance, a handsome, vain, good-natured boy had met two self-possessed young ladies of distinction and breeding, and had cut the usual figure.

For the next hundred yards his cheeks burned and his vanity cooled.  But bumptiousness is elastic in France, as in England, and doubtless among the Esquimaux.  “Well, they are pretty girls,” says he to himself.  “I never saw two such pretty girls together; they will do for me to flirt with while I am banished to this Arcadia.”  Banished from school, I beg to observe.

And “awful beauty” being no longer in sight, Mr. Edouard resolved he would flirt with them to their hearts’ content.  But there are ladies with whom a certain preliminary is required before you can flirt with them.  You must be on speaking terms.  How was this to be managed?