dried up her mother like a partridge left to roast at too fierce a
fire."

Gatien de Boirouge contrived to let Madame de la Baudraye know what
the journalist had said of her in the course of the dinner, which was
copious, not to say splendid, and the lady took care not to talk too
much while it was proceeding. This lack of conversation betrayed
Gatien's indiscretion. Etienne tried to regain his footing, but all
Dinah's advances were directed to Bianchon.

However, half-way through the evening, the Baroness was gracious to
Lousteau again. Have you never observed what great meanness may be
committed for small ends? Thus the haughty Dinah, who would not
sacrifice herself for a fool, who in the depths of the country led
such a wretched life of struggles, of suppressed rebellion, of
unuttered poetry, who to get away from Lousteau had climbed the
highest and steepest peak of her scorn, and who would not have come
down if she had seen the sham Byron at her feet, suddenly stepped off
it as she recollected her album.

Madame de la Baudraye had caught the mania for autographs; she
possessed an oblong volume which deserved the name of album better
than most, as two-thirds of the pages were still blank. The Baronne de
Fontaine, who had kept it for three months, had with great difficulty
obtained a line from Rossini, six bars written by Meyerbeer, the four
lines that Victor Hugo writes in every album, a verse from Lamartine,
a few words from Beranger, _Calypso ne pouvait se consoler du depart
d'Ulysse_ (the first words of _Telemaque_) written by George Sand,
Scribe's famous lines on the Umbrella, a sentence from Charles Nodier,
an outline of distance by Jules Dupre, the signature of David