He will not have the bad taste to show his indignation. No! he will
pity these unfortunate society people condemned to hypocrisy and
falsehood. He will even excuse their whims and vices as he thinks of the
frightful ennui that overwhelms them. Yes, he will understand how the
unhappy Duc de la Tour-Prends-Garde, who is condemned to hear La Favorita
seventeen times during the winter, may feel at times the need of a
violent distraction, and go to drink white wine with his servant. Amedee
will be full of indulgence, only one must pardon him for his plebeian
heart and native uncouthness; for at the moment when he shall have
fathomed the emptiness and vanity of this worldly farce, he will keep
all of his sympathy for those who retain something like nature. He will
esteem infinitely more the poorest of the workmen--a wood-sawyer or a
bell-hanger--than a politician haranguing from the mantel, or an old
literary dame who sparkles like a window in the Palais-Royal, and is
tattooed like a Caribbean; he will prefer an old; wrinkled, village
grand-dame in her white cap, who still hoes, although sixty years old,
her little field of potatoes.




CHAPTER XIII

A SERPENT AT THE FIRESIDE

A little more than a year has passed. It is now the first days of
October; and when the morning mist is dissipated, the sky is of so limpid
a blue and the air so pure and fresh, that Amedee Violette is almost
tempted to make a paper kite and fly it over the fortifications, as he
did in his youth. But the age for that has passed; Amedee's real kite is