“Nay, madame, you flatter me. Bianchon is a great man, but I am too insignificant!—Twenty years hence my name will be more difficult to identify than that of the Public Prosecutor whose axiom, written in your album, will designate him as an obscurer Montesquieu. And I should want at least twenty-four hours to improvise some sufficiently bitter reflections, for I could only describe what I feel.”
“I wish you needed a fortnight,” said Madame de la Baudraye graciously, as she handed him the book. “I should keep you here all the longer.”
At five next morning all the party in the Chateau d’Anzy were astir, little La Baudraye having arranged a day’s sport for the Parisians—less for their pleasure than to gratify his own conceit. He was delighted to make them walk over the twelve hundred acres of waste land that he was intending to reclaim, an undertaking that would cost some hundred thousand francs, but which might yield an increase of thirty to sixty thousand francs a year in the returns of the estate of Anzy.
“Do you know why the Public Prosecutor has not come out with us?” asked Gatien Boirouge of Monsieur Gravier.
“Why he told us that he was obliged to sit to-day; the minor cases are before the Court,” replied the other.
“And did you believe that?” cried Gatien. “Well, my papa said to me, ‘Monsieur Lebas will not join you early, for Monsieur de Clagny has begged him as his deputy to sit for him!’”
“Indeed!” said Gravier, changing countenance. “And Monsieur de la Baudraye is gone to La Charite!”
“But why do you meddle in such matters?” said Bianchon to Gatien.
“Horace is right,” said Lousteau. “I cannot imagine why you trouble your heads so much about each other; you waste your time in frivolities.”
Horace Bianchon looked at Etienne Lousteau, as much as to say that newspaper epigrams and the satire of the “funny column” were incomprehensible at Sancerre.