Just at this moment, Mauleon and d’Arzenac compose the team; I do not know who is on the waiting-list.  She will probably spend the winter here with her aunt, Mademoiselle de Corandeuil, one of the hatefullest old women on the Rue de Varennes.  The husband is a good fellow who, since the July revolution, has lived upon his estates, caring for his forests and killing wild boars without troubling himself much about his wife.’

“He then told me which houses these ladies frequented, and left me, saying with a knowing air: 

“’Take care, if you intend to try the power of your seductions upon the little Baroness; whoever meddles with her smarts for it!’

“This information from a viper like Casorans satisfied me in every way.  Evidently the place was not taken; impregnable, that was another thing.

“Before Madame de Bergenheim’s return, I began to show myself assiduously at the houses of which my friend had spoken.  My position in the Faubourg Saint-Germain is peculiar, but good, according to my opinion.  I have enough family ties to be sustained by several should I be attacked by many, and this is the essential point.  It is true that, thanks to my works, I am regarded as an atheist and a Jacobin; aside from these two little defects, they think well enough of me.  Besides, it is a notorious fact that I have rejected several offers from the present government, and refused last year the ‘croix d’honneur’; this makes amends and washes away half my sins.  Finally, I have the reputation of having a certain-knowledge of heraldry, which I owe to my uncle, a confirmed hunter after genealogical claims.  This gains me a respect which makes me laugh sometimes, when I see people who detest me greet me as cordially as the Cure of Saint-Eustache greeted Bayle, for fear that I might destroy their favorite saint.  However, in this society, I am no longer Gerfaut of the Porte-Saint-Martin, but I am the Vicomte de Gerfaut.  Perhaps, with your bourgeois ideas, you do not understand—­”

“Bourgeois!” exclaimed Marillac, bounding from his seat, “what are you talking about?  Do you wish that we should cut each other’s throats before breakfast to-morrow?  Bourgeois! why not grocer?  I am an artist—­don’t you know that by this time?”

“Don’t get angry, my dear fellow; I meant to say that in certain places the title of a Vicomte has still a more powerful attraction than you, with your artistic but plebeian ideas, would suppose in this year of our Lord 1832.”

“Well and good.  I accept your apology.”

“A vicomte’s title is a recommendation in the eyes of people who still cling to the baubles of nobility, and all women are of this class.  There is something, I know not what, delicate and knightly in this title, which suits a youngish bachelor.  Duke above all titles is the one that sounds the best.  Moliere and Regnard have done great harm to the title of marquis.  Count is terribly bourgeois, thanks to the senators of the empire.  As to a Baron, unless he is called Montmorency or Beaufremont, it is the lowest grade of nobility; vicomte, on the contrary, is above reproach; it exhales a mixed odor of the old regime and young France; then, don’t you know, our Chateaubriand was a vicomte.