A Distinguished Provincial at Paris

by Honoré de Balzac

After dinner Châtelet took his guests to the Vaudeville. Lucien, in his heart, was not over well pleased to see Châtelet again, and cursed the chance that had brought the Baron to Paris. The Baron said that ambition had brought him to town; he had hopes of an appointment as secretary-general to a government department, and meant to take a seat in the Council of State as Master of Requests. He had come to Paris to ask for fulfilment of the promises that had been given him, for a man of his stamp could not be expected to remain a comptroller all his life; he would rather be nothing at all, and offer himself for election as deputy, or re-enter diplomacy. Châtelet grew visibly taller; Lucien dimly began to recognize in this elderly beau the superiority of the man of the world who knows Paris; and, most of all, he felt ashamed to owe his evening’s amusement to his rival. And while the poet looked ill at ease and awkward, Her Royal Highness’ ex-secretary was quite in his element. He smiled at his rival’s hesitations, at his astonishment, at the questions he put, at the little mistakes which the latter ignorantly made, much as an old salt laughs at an apprentice who has not found his sea legs; but Lucien’s pleasure at seeing a play for the first time in Paris outweighed the annoyance of these small humiliations.

That evening marked an epoch in Lucien’s career; he put away a good many of his ideas as to provincial life in the course of it. His horizon widened; society assumed different proportions. There were fair Parisiennes in fresh and elegant toilettes all about him; Mme. de Bargeton’s costume, tolerably ambitious though it was, looked dowdy by comparison; the material, like the fashion and the color, was out of date. That way of arranging her hair, so bewitching in Angoulême, looked frightfully ugly here among the daintily devised coiffures which he saw in every direction.

“Will she always look like that?” said he to himself, ignorant that the morning had been spent in preparing a transformation.

In the provinces comparison and choice are out of the question; when a face has grown familiar it comes to possess a certain beauty that is taken for granted. But transport the pretty woman of the provinces to Paris, and no one takes the slightest notice of her; her prettiness is of the comparative degree illustrated by the saying that among the blind the one-eyed are kings. Lucien’s eyes were now busy comparing Mme. de Bargeton with other women, just as she herself had contrasted him with Châtelet on the previous day. And Mme. de Bargeton, on her part, permitted herself some strange reflections upon her lover. The poet cut a poor figure notwithstanding his singular beauty. The sleeves of his jacket were too short; with his ill-cut country gloves and a waistcoat too scanty for him, he looked prodigiously ridiculous, compared with the young men in the balcony—“positively pitiable,” thought Mme. de Bargeton. Châtelet, interested in her without presumption, taking care of her in a manner that revealed a profound passion; Châtelet, elegant, and as much at home as an actor treading the familiar boards of his theatre, in two days had recovered all the ground lost in the past six months.

Ordinary people will not admit that our sentiments towards each other can totally change in a moment, and yet certain it is, that two lovers not seldom fly apart even more quickly than they drew together. In Mme. de Bargeton and in Lucien a process of disenchantment was at work; Paris was the cause. Life had widened out before the poet’s eyes, as society came to wear a new aspect for Louise. Nothing but an accident now was néeded to sever finally the bond that united them; nor was that blow, so terrible for Lucien, very long delayed.

Mme. de Bargeton set Lucien down at his inn, and drove home with Châtelet, to the intense vexation of the luckless lover.

“What will they say about me?” he wondered, as he climbed the stairs to his dismal room.

“That poor fellow is uncommonly dull,” said Châtelet, with a smile, when the door was closed.

“That is the way with those who have a world of thoughts in their heart and brain. Men who have so much in them to give out in great works long dreamed of, profess a certain contempt for conversation, a commerce in which the intellect spends itself in small change,” returned the haughty Nègrepelisse. She still had courage to defend Lucien, but less for Lucien’s sake than for her own.

“I grant it you willingly,” replied the Baron, “but we live with human beings and not with books. There, dear Naïs! I see how it is, there is nothing between you yet, and I am delighted that it is so. If you decide to bring an interest of a kind hitherto lacking into your life, let it not be this so-called genius, I implore you. How if you have made a mistake? Suppose that in a few days’ time, when you have compared him with men whom you will meet, men of real ability, men who have distinguished themselves in good earnest; suppose that you should discover, dear and fair siren, that it is no lyre-bearer that you have borne into port on your dazzling shoulders, but a little ape, with no manners and no capacity; a presumptuous fool who may be a wit in L’Houmeau, but turns out a very ordinary specimen of a young man in Paris? And, after all, volumes of verse come out every week here, the worst of them better than all M. Chardon’s poetry put together. For pity’s sake, wait and compare! To-morrow, Friday, is Opéra night,” he continued as the carriage turned into the Rue Nueve-de-Luxembourg; “Mme. d’Espard has the box of the First Gentlemen of the Chamber, and will take you, no doubt. I shall go to Mme. de Sérizy’s box to behold you in your glory. They are giving Les Danaïdes.”