As he is a bachelor, and possesses a coat and a pair of black
cassimere trousers, and when he pleases may thus assume the appearance
of an elegant diplomat, and as he is not without a certain intelligent
air, he is admitted to several more or less literary salons: he bows
to the five or six academicians who possess genius, influence or
talent, he visits two or three of our great poets, he allows himself,
in coffee-rooms, to call the two or three justly celebrated women of
our epoch by their Christian names; he is on the best of terms with
the blue stockings of the second grade,--who ought to be called
_socks_,--and he shakes hands and takes glasses of absinthe with the
stars of the smaller newspapers.

Such is the history of every species of ordinary men--men who have
been denied what they call good luck. This good luck is nothing less
than unyielding will, incessant labor, contempt for an easily won
celebrity, immense learning, and that patience which, according to
Buffon, is the whole of genius, but which certainly is the half of it.

You do not yet see any indication of a petty trouble for Caroline. You
imagine that this history of five hundred young men engaged at this
moment in wearing smooth the paving stones of Paris, was written as a
sort of warning to the families of the eighty-six departments of
France: but read these two letters which lately passed between two
girls differently married, and you will see that it was as necessary
as the narrative by which every true melodrama was until lately
expected to open. You will divine the skillful manoeuvres of the
Parisian peacock spreading his tail in the recesses of his native
village, and polishing up, for matrimonial purposes, the rays of his
glory, which, like those of the sun, are only warm and brilliant at a