Page:The red and the black (1916).djvu/283

Rh "I think that even your servants make fun of him. What a name Baron Bâton," said M. de Caylus.

"What's in a name?" he said to us the other day, went on Matilde. "Imagine the Duke de Bouillon announced for the first time. So far as I am concerned the public only need to get used to me."

"Julien left the vicinity of the sofa."

Still insufficiently appreciative of the charming subtleties of a delicate raillery to laugh at a joke, he considered that a jest ought to have some logical foundation. He saw nothing in these young peoples' conversation except a vein of universal scandal-mongering and was shocked by it. His provincial or English prudery went so far as to detect envy in it, though in this he was certainly mistaken.

"Count Norbert," he said to himself, "who has had to make three drafts for a twenty-line letter to his colonel would be only too glad to have written once in his whole life one page as good as M. Sainclair."

Julien approached successively the several groups and attracted no attention by reason of his lack of importance. He followed the Baron Bâton from a distance and tried to hear him.

This witty man appeared nervous and Julien did not see him recover his equanimity before he had hit upon three or four stinging phrases. Julien thought that this kind of wit had great need of space.

The Baron could not make epigrams. He needed at least four sentences of six lines each, in order to be brilliant.

"That man argues, he does not talk," said someone behind Julien. He turned round and reddened with pleasure when he heard the name of the comte Chalvet. He was the subtlest man of the century. Julien had often found his name in the Memorial of St. Helena and in the portions of history dictated by Napoleon. The diction of comte Chalvet was laconic, his phrases were flashes of lightning—just, vivid, deep. If he talked about any matter the conversation immediately made a step forward; he imported facts into it; it was a pleasure to hear him. In politics, however, he was a brazen cynic.

"I am independent, I am," he was saying to a gentleman with three stars, of whom apparently he was making fun. "Why insist on my having to-day the same opinion I had