The aunts and the old maids had led Madame de Beausire away, and she left the restaurant with her daughter, while Bélan remained. He saw us and came to bid us good-night, faltering: “I have let my wife and her mother go before, because, you know, they have to put the bride to bed; and of course I cannot be there.” “My dear Bélan, I am afraid that Madame de Beausire will make another scene to-night.” “Oh, no! At all events, if she does, I will show my spirit.” We drove away, and as we returned home, Eugénie and I agreed that a man is always very foolish to enter a family which thinks that it does him much honor by allying itself with him. If chance has willed that he should be born in a lower class, he should, by his intellect or his character, show himself superior to those who try to humiliate him. X A QUARREL.--THE FIRST VEXATION A few days after Bélan’s wedding, we received a visit from Monsieur and Madame Giraud. I divined what brought them, and in truth they were hardly seated before Giraud exclaimed: “You must have been greatly surprised not to see us at Bélan’s wedding?” “In fact,” added Madame Giraud, “it made an impression on everybody. It was so terribly vulgar! So extraordinary! Just think of it! It was at our house that they met, and it was Giraud who took the first steps, who sounded Madame de Beausire, and who enumerated to her the young man’s property and good qualities; and yet we were not invited to the breakfast, or even to the ball! It’s an outrage!” “More than that, it was indecent!” cried Giraud; “and if my wife hadn’t restrained me, I would have demanded satisfaction.” “No, no; people would have thought that we cared about a wedding party; but thank God! we have more of them than we want. By the way, they say that that one was very dismal and tiresome!” “Why, it was not very lively,” said Eugénie. “Ah! yours was the lovely one, my dear Madame Blémont, and managed with such taste and such profusion! I confess that I had thirteen ices; salvers kept passing me, and I forgot myself.” “Yes, that was a charming wedding,” said Giraud; “but they tell me that at Bélan’s there weren’t enough people to form two quadrilles of twelve, and that they were almost all outlandish creatures of the last century. And that old Beausire woman did nothing but cry. And then that night--do you know what happened?” “No, we don’t know.”