house, and found a place close to the armchair in which the duke was
seated. Instantly I was suffocated by the heat, and dazzled by the
lights, the scarlet draperies, the gilded ornaments, the dresses, and
the diamonds of the first public ball I had ever witnessed. I was
pushed hither and thither by a mass of men and women, who hustled each
other in a cloud of dust. The brazen clash of military music was
drowned in the hurrahs and acclamations of "Long live the Duc
d'Angouleme! Long live the King! Long live the Bourbons!" The ball was
an outburst of pent-up enthusiasm, where each man endeavored to outdo
the rest in his fierce haste to worship the rising sun,--an exhibition
of partisan greed which left me unmoved, or rather, it disgusted me
and drove me back within myself.

Swept onward like a straw in the whirlwind, I was seized with a
childish desire to be the Duc d'Angouleme himself, to be one of these
princes parading before an awed assemblage. This silly fancy of a
Tourangean lad roused an ambition to which my nature and the
surrounding circumstances lent dignity. Who would not envy such
worship?--a magnificent repetition of which I saw a few months later,
when all Paris rushed to the feet of the Emperor on his return from
Elba. The sense of this dominion exercised over the masses, whose
feelings and whose very life are thus merged into one soul, dedicated
me then and thenceforth to glory, that priestess who slaughters the
Frenchmen of to-day as the Druidess once sacrificed the Gauls.

Suddenly I met the woman who was destined to spur these ambitious
desires and to crown them by sending me into the heart of royalty. Too
timid to ask any one to dance,--fearing, moreover, to confuse the
figures,--I naturally became very awkward, and did not know what to do
with my arms and legs. Just as I was suffering severely from the