Couture, a man about
forty-three years of age, half worn-out, did not redeem the unpleasant
sonority of his name by birth; he said little of the authors of his
days.
Madame Schontz was bemoaning to herself the rarity of eligible men,
when Couture presented to her a provincial, supplied with the two
handles by which women take hold of such pitchers when they wish to
keep them. To sketch this person will be to paint a portion of the
youth of the day. The digression is history.
In 1838, Fabien du Ronceret, son of a chief-justice of the Royal court
at Caen (who had lately died), left his native town of Alencon,
resigning his judgeship (a position in which his father had compelled
him, he said, to waste his time), and came to Paris, with the
intention of making a noise there,--a Norman idea, difficult to
realize, for he could scarcely scrape together eight thousand francs a
year; his mother still being alive and possessing a life-interest in a
valuable estate in Alencon. This young man had already, during
previous visits to Paris, tried his rope, like an acrobat, and had
recognized the great vice of the social replastering of 1830.
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