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comparison; the material, like the fashion and the color, was out of
date.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 Angouleme,
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 Chatelet 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,"