Although I knew it to be my duty, from M. Grégoire's previous choice of me, to give my special attention first to his niece, and although the expression of gentle candour on her face had won me from the very outset, it was to Mademoiselle Laurence that I first paid court.
It was to her I offered my arm for a walk in the park after dinner.
I will not hide the fact that I was dreadfully bored, and that I must therefore have behaved very awkwardly and very ridiculously. My appearance, besides, which was all right for a child attending his first communion in 1816, was slightly eccentric in the case of a young man making his first debut into society in 1818. Breeches at that time were only worn by old-fashioned people, who almost all belonged to the previous century, so it came about that I, almost a child still, whom no one would have been surprised to see in a turn-down collar, a round waistcoat, and fancy knickerbockers, was dressed like an old man—an anachronism that made the charms of the coquettish young lady on my arm stand out to still greater advantage. She knew well enough that the ridicule that was being poured on her cavalier could not affect her, so she kept as calm a demeanour in the midst of the smiles we met and the curious looks that followed us, as Virgil's divinities, who passed in the midst of men unmoved by the looks of men, because they did not deign to notice them. But it was a different matter to me; I could feel myself blushing all the time; and, when anyone I knew came by, instead of meeting his glance proudly, I simply turned my head away.
Like the stag in the fable, I discovered that I had very poor legs.
My poor mother imagined that because I was heir to my father's breeches, I had also inherited his calves.
They have developed since, it is true, but they are a superfluous luxury at a time when short breeches are no longer worn.
Worse than this was the fact that the presence of the two strangers made me a centre of curiosity. Mademoiselle Vittoria walked immediately after us, giving her arm to the abbé's sister, who was a little hunchback, a most excellent housekeeper to her brother, but whose plain dress and deformity of figure stood out most conspicuously against the elegant dress and ample voluptuous figure of the Spanish woman.
Every now and again the two young girls exchanged looks, and, although I did not catch them, I could feel, so to speak, the smiles that passed between them; smiles which sent the blood rushing up to my temples with shame, for they seemed to say, "Oh! my dear friend, what a bear garden have we stumbled upon!"
A word I heard increased my confusion and turned it to anger.
A young Parisian who had been employed for two or three years at the Castle, and who was gifted with all the qualities I lacked, that is to say, he was fair, pink, plump, and dressed in the latest fashion, crossed our path, and gazed after us through an eyeglass hung from a little steel chain.