watch! From that moment the young man assumed, in Oscar's eyes, the
proportions of a personage.

Living in the rue de la Cerisaie since 1815, taken to and from school
by his step-father, Oscar had no other points of comparison since his
adolescence than the poverty-stricken household of his mother. Brought
up strictly, by Moreau's advice, he seldom went to the theatre, and
then to nothing better than the Ambigu-Comique, where his eyes could
see little elegance, if indeed the eyes of a child riveted on a
melodrama were likely to examine the audience. His step-father still
wore, after the fashion of the Empire, his watch in the fob of his
trousers, from which there depended over his abdomen a heavy gold
chain, ending in a bunch of heterogeneous ornaments, seals, and a
watch-key with a round top and flat sides, on which was a landscape in
mosaic. Oscar, who considered that old-fashioned finery as the "ne
plus ultra" of adornment, was bewildered by the present revelation of
superior and negligent elegance. The young man exhibited, offensively,
a pair of spotless gloves, and seemed to wish to dazzle Oscar by
twirling with much grace a gold-headed switch cane.

Oscar had reached that last quarter of adolescence when little things
cause immense joys and immense miseries,--a period when youth prefers
misfortune to a ridiculous suit of clothes, and caring nothing for the
real interests of life, torments itself about frivolities, about
neckcloths, and the passionate desire to appear a man. Then the young
fellow swells himself out; his swagger is all the more portentous
because it is exercised on nothings. Yet if he envies a fool who is
elegantly dressed, he is also capable of enthusiasm over talent, and
of genuine admiration for genius. Such defects as these, when they
have no root in the heart, prove only the exuberance of sap,--the