Parisians arrived in their native province, and found it absorbed in
the unremitting toil of the wine-crop of 1836; there could therefore
be no public demonstration in their favor. "We have fallen flat," said
Lousteau to his companion, in the slang of the stage.

In 1836, Lousteau, worn by sixteen years of struggle in the Capital,
and aged quite as much by pleasure as by penury, hard work, and
disappointments, looked eight-and-forty, though he was no more than
thirty-seven. He was already bald, and had assumed a Byronic air in
harmony with his early decay and the lines furrowed in his face by
over-indulgence in champagne. He ascribed these signs-manual of
dissipation to the severities of a literary life, declaring that the
Press was murderous; and he gave it to be understood that it consumed
superior talents, so as to lend a grace to his exhaustion. In his
native town he thought proper to exaggerate his affected contempt of
life and his spurious misanthropy. Still, his eyes could flash with
fire like a volcano supposed to be extinct, and he endeavored, by
dressing fashionably, to make up for the lack of youth that might
strike a woman's eye.

Horace Bianchon, who wore the ribbon of the Legion of Honor, was fat
and burly, as beseems a fashionable physician, with a patriarchal air,
his hair thick and long, a prominent brow, the frame of a hard worker,
and the calm expression of a philosopher. This somewhat prosaic
personality set off his more frivolous companion to advantage.



The two great men remained unrecognized during a whole morning at the
inn where they had put up, and it was only by chance that Monsieur de