“My dear Sorel,” said Norbert, “you are extremely smart, but you come from the mountains. Mind you never bow like that great poet is doing, even to God the Father.”
“Ah there’s a really witty man, M. the Baron Bâton,” said mademoiselle de la Mole, imitating a little the voice of the flunkey who had just announced him.
“I think that even your servants make fun of him. What a name Baron Bâton,” said M. de Caylus.
“What’s in a name?” he said to us the other day, went on Matilde. “Imagine the Duke de Bouillon announced for the first time. So far as I am concerned the public only need to get used to me.”
“Julien left the vicinity of the sofa.”
Still insufficiently appreciative of the charming subtleties of a delicate raillery to laugh at a joke, he considered that a jest ought to have some logical foundation. He saw nothing in these young peoples’ conversation except a vein of universal scandal-mongering and was shocked by it. His provincial or English prudery went so far as to detect envy in it, though in this he was certainly mistaken.
“Count Norbert,” he said to himself, “who has had to make three drafts for a twenty-line letter to his colonel would be only too glad to have written once in his whole life one page as good as M. Sainclair.”
Julien approached successively the several groups and attracted no attention by reason of his lack of importance. He followed the Baron Bâton from a distance and tried to hear him.
This witty man appeared nervous and Julien did not see him recover his equanimity before he had hit upon three or four stinging phrases. Julien thought that this kind of wit had great need of space.
The Baron could not make epigrams. He needed at least four sentences of six lines each, in order to be brilliant.