“Why, that is easily explained,” said she. “M. de Rubempré works for a printer. It is as if a pretty woman should make her own dresses,” she added, looking at Lolotte.
“He printed his poetry himself!” said the women among themselves.
“Then, why does he call himself M. de Rubempré?” inquired Jacques. “If a noble takes a handicraft, he ought to lay his name aside.”
“So he did as a matter of fact,” said Zizine, “but his name was plebeian, and he took his mother’s name, which is noble.”
“Well, if his verses are printed, we can read them for ourselves,” said Astolphe.
This piece of stupidity complicated the question, until Sixte du Châtelet condescended to inform these unlettered folk that the prefatory announcement was no oratorical flourish, but a statement of fact, and added that the poems had been written by a Royalist brother of Marie-Joseph Chénier, the Revolutionary leader. All Angoulême, except Mme. de Rastignac and her two daughters and the Bishop, who had really felt the grandeur of the poetry, were mystified, and took offence at the hoax. There was a smothered murmur, but Lucien did not heed it. The intoxication of the poetry was upon him; he was far away from the hateful world, striving to render in speech the music that filled his soul, seeing the faces about him through a cloudy haze. He read the sombre Elegy on the Suicide, lines in the taste of a by-gone day, pervaded by sublime melancholy; then he turned to the page where the line occurs, “Thy songs are sweet, I love to say them over,” and ended with the delicate idyll Neere.
Mme. de Bargeton sat with one hand buried in her curls, heedless of the havoc she wrought among them, gazing before her with unseeing eyes, alone in her drawing-room, lost in delicious dreaming; for the first time in her life she had been transported to the sphere which was hers by right of nature. Judge, therefore, how unpleasantly she was disturbed by Amélie, who took it upon herself to express the general wish.
“Naïs,” this voice broke in, “we came to hear M. Chardon’s poetry, and you are giving us poetry out of a book. The extracts are very nice, but the ladies feel a patriotic preference for the wine of the country; they would rather have it.”
“The French language does not lend itself very readily to poetry, does it?” Astolphe remarked to Châtelet. “Cicero’s prose is a thousand times more poetical to my way of thinking.”
“The true poetry of France is song, lyric verse,” Châtelet answered.