“Oh! my dear friend, how difficult it is to struggle against an official candidate!  But our candidate is an astonishing man.  He goes about all day upon the railroads in our department, unfolding his programme before the travelling countrymen and changing compartments at each station.  What a stroke of genius! a perambulating public assembling.  This idea came to him from seeing a harpist make the trip from Havre to Honfleur, playing ‘Il Bacio’ all the time.  Ah, one must look alive!  The prefect does not shrink from any way of fighting us.  Did he not spread through one of our most Catholic cantons the report that we were Voltairians, enemies to religion and devourers of priests?  Fortunately, we have yet four Sundays before us, from now until the voting-day, and the patron will go to high mass and communion in our four more important parishes.  That will be a response!  If such a man is not elected, universal suffrage is hopeless!”

Amedee was not at that time so disenchanted with political matters as he became later, and he asked himself with an uneasy feeling whether this model candidate, who was perhaps about to give himself sacrilgious indigestion, and who showed his profession of faith as a cutler shows his knives, was not simply a quack.

Arthur Papillon did not give him time to devote himself to such unpleasant reflections, but said to him, in a frank, protecting tone: 

“And you, my boy, let us see, where do you stand?  You have been very successful, have you not?  The other evening at the house of Madame la Comtesse Fontaine, you know—­the widow of one of Louis Philippe’s ministers and daughter of Marshal Lefievre—­Jocquelet recited your ‘Sebastopol’ with enormous success.  What a voice that Jocquelet has!  We have not his like at the Paris bar.  Fortunate poet!  I have seen your book lying about in the boudoir of more than one beautiful woman.  Well, I hope that you will leave the Cafe de Seville and not linger with all these badly combed fellows.  You must go into society; it is indispensable to a man of letters, and I will present you whenever you wish.”

For the time being Amedee’s ardor was a little dampened concerning the Bohemians with whom he enjoyed so short a favor, and who had also in many ways shocked his delicacy.  He was not desirous to be called “thou” by Pere Lebuffle.

But to go into society!  His education had been so modest!  Should he know how to appear, how to conduct himself properly?  He asked this of Papillon.  Our poet was proud, he feared ridicule, and would not consent to play an inferior role anywhere; and then his success just then was entirely platonic.  He was still very poor and lived in the Faubourg St.-Jacques.  Massif ought to pay him in a few days five hundred francs for the second edition of his book; but what is a handful of napoleons?