“If only they would go!” thought he.
Alas! Amaury had just said to Georges, as he struck the wheel of the chaise with his cane:
“And you are prepared to trust your future career on board this frail vessel?”
“Needs must!” replied Georges in a fateful tone.
Oscar heaved a sigh as he noted the youth’s hat, cocked cavalierly over one ear to show a fine head of fair hair elaborately curled, while he, by his stepfather’s orders, wore his black hair in a brush above his forehead, cut quite short like a soldier’s. The vain boy’s face was round and chubby, bright with the color of vigorous health; that of “Georges” was long, delicate, and pale. This young man had a broad brow, and his chest filled out a shawl-pattern waistcoat. As Oscar admired his tightly-fitting iron-gray trousers, and his overcoat, sitting closely to the figure, with Brandenburg braiding and oval buttons, he felt as if the romantic stranger, blessed with so many advantages, were making an unfair display of his superiority, just as an ugly woman is offended by the mere sight of a beauty. The ring of his spurred boot-heels, which the young man accentuated rather too much for Oscar’s liking, went to the boy’s heart. In short, Oscar was as uncomfortable in his clothes, homemade perhaps out of his stepfather’s old ones, as the other enviable youth was satisfied in his.
“That fellow must have ten francs at least in his pocket,” thought Oscar.
The stranger happening to turn round, what were Oscar’s feelings when he discerned a gold chain about his neck—with a gold watch, no doubt, at the end of it.
Living in the Rue de la Cerisaie since 1815, taken to and from school on his holidays by his stepfather Clapart, Oscar had never had any standard of comparison but his mother’s poverty-stricken household. Kept very strictly, by Moreau’s advice, he rarely went to the play, and then aspired no higher than to the Ambigu Comique, where little elegance met his gaze, even if the absorbed attention a boy devotes to the stage had allowed him to study the house. His stepfather still wore his watch in a fob in the fashion of the Empire, with a heavy gold chain hanging over his stomach, and ending in a bunch of miscellaneous objects—seals, and a watch-key with a flat round top, in which was set a landscape in mosaic. Oscar, who looked on this out-of-date splendor as the ne plus ultra of luxury, was quite bewildered by this revelation of superior and less ponderous elegance. The young man also made an insolent display of a pair of good gloves, and seemed bent on blinding Oscar by his graceful handling of a smart cane with a gold knob.
Oscar had just reached the final stage of boyhood in which trifles are the cause of great joys and great anguish, when a real misfortune seems preferable to a ridiculous costume; and vanity, having no great interests in life to absorb it, centres in frivolities, and dress, and the anxiety to be thought a man. The youth magnifies himself, and his self-assertion is all the more marked because it turns on trifles; still, though he envies a well-dressed noodle, he can be also fired with enthusiasm for talent, and admire a man of genius. His faults, when they are not rooted in his heart, only show the exuberance of vitality and a lavish imagination. When a boy of nineteen, an only son, austerely brought up at home as a result of the poverty that weighs so cruelly on a clerk with twelve hundred francs’ salary, but worshiped by a mother, who for his sake endures the bitterest privations—when such a boy is dazzled by a youth of two-and-twenty, envies him his frogged coat lined with silk, his sham cashmere waistcoat, and a tie slipped through a vulgar ring, is not this a mere peccadillo such as may be seen in every class of life in the inferior who envies his betters?
Even a man of genius yields to this primitive passion. Did not Rousseau of Geneva envy Venture and Bacle?
But Oscar went on from the peccadillo to the real fault; he felt humiliated; he owed his traveling companion a grudge; and a secret desire surged up in his heart to show him that he was as good a man as he.
The two young bucks walked to and fro, from the gateway to the stables and back, going out to the street; and as they turned on their heel, they each time looked at Oscar ensconced in his corner. Oscar, convinced that whenever they laughed it was at him, affected profound indifference. He began to hum the tune of a song then in fashion among the Liberals, “C’est la faute à Voltaire, c’est la faute à Rousseau.” (It is all the fault of Voltaire and Rousseau.) This assumption, no doubt, made them take him for some underling lawyer’s clerk.
“Why, perhaps he sings in the chorus at the Opera!” said Amaury.
Exasperated this time, Oscar bounded in his seat; raising the back curtain, he said to Pierrotin:
“When are we to be off?”
“Directly,” said the man, who had his whip in his hand, but his eyes fixed on the Rue d’Enghien.
The scene was now enlivened by the arrival of a young man escorted by a perfect pickle of a boy, who appeared with a porter at their heels hauling a barrow by a strap. The young man spoke confidentially to Pierrotin, who wagged his head and hailed his stableman. The man hurried up to help
