advantage as that! After a ball, when a score of pretty women stand
behooded waiting for their carriages, with their husbands and adorers
at their sides, Beaudenord could hear his people called without a pang
of mortification. In the second place, he rejoiced in the full
complement of limbs; he was whole and sound, had no mote in his eyes,
no false hair, no artificial calves; he was neither knock-kneed nor
bandy-legged, his dorsal column was straight, his waist slender, his
hands white and shapely. His hair was black; he was of a complexion
neither too pink, like a grocer's assistant, nor yet too brown, like a
Calabrese. Finally, and this is an essential point, Beaudenord was not
too handsome, like some of our friends that look rather too much of
professional beauties to be anything else; but no more of that; we
have said it, it is shocking! Well, he was a crack shot, and sat a
horse to admiration; he had fought a duel for a trifle, and had not
killed his man.

"If you wish to know in what pure, complete, and unadulterated
happiness consists in this Nineteenth Century in Paris--the happiness,
that is to say, of a young man of twenty-six--do you realize that you
must enter into the infinitely small details of existence?
Beaudenord's bootmaker had precisely hit off his style of foot; he was
well shod; his tailor loved to clothe him. Godefroid neither rolled
his r's, nor lapsed into Normanisms nor Gascon; he spoke pure and
correct French, and tied his cravat correctly (like Finot). He had
neither father nor mother--such luck had he!--and his guardian was the
Marquis d'Aiglemont, his cousin by marriage. He could go among city
people as he chose, and the Faubourg Saint-Germain could make no
objection; for, fortunately, a young bachelor is allowed to make his
own pleasure his sole rule of life, he is at liberty to betake himself
wherever amusement is to be found, and to shun the gloomy places where