Granville's estate

After returning from the Moor Street of the Holy Temple, Louis was a little sleepy for several days.

The horrific and continuous poverty of the No. 12 district of Paris is so impressive that Louis would bet that even the poorest peasant in his hometown who can only live on potatoes and buckwheat cakes all year round, or the farthest part of France Because there are no fishing boats and nets, the fishermen who cannot go to sea and can only pick limpets from the rocks to support themselves are living a better life than the people in the No.12 district of Paris, the pearl of France.Even if life is the same poor, farmers in other provinces and fishermen by the sea can at least breathe freely, while people in the No. 12 district of Paris can only endure the dirty air in the big city, squeezed into narrow cells like convicts. In the attic on the roof, I endured loneliness day after day and worked exhaustingly.

Alred noticed Louis's depressed mood after returning from Sologne, but he thought it was just because his friend was too gentle.This kind of thing is also very common. It is easy for gentle and sentimental people to strongly empathize with the situation of others, and even sink themselves into an emotional trough. However, it is actually unnecessary-the fate of man is God After the arrangement, some people in the world are destined to be cattle and horses, and some are destined to serve cattle and horses. If this is the case, why worry about the fate of others?

Allred didn't say these words to Louis, but he took some measures to get his friend out of the emotional haze-he made all the preparations before attending the ball of the Vicomtesse de Bourgogne. Leave it to Louis to do it.

This is a huge project!

When he promised Alred that he would go to Madame de Bourgogne's ball, Louis never thought that the preparations before attending a ball could become a tedious and huge job.In his hometown of Magon, if a single man is invited to a ball held by the ladies of the town, he only needs to be fully dressed at the time indicated on the invitation letter and go in a carriage. There is no need to worry about it. Anything else—but in Paris, that's not the way to go.In this place where the upper class in France gathers, everyone wants to be better than others, which leads to the fact that even if you want to be an ordinary member of it, you need to work ten times harder than other places, otherwise you will Being compared by others and slipping into the abyss; this can only make a person "ordinary", a kind of extravagant Parisian ordinary, if you want to shine in this kind of place, it will be terrible, even if it is It may not be possible to spend ten times more effort and one hundred times more money.

Alred told Louis that the nobles of Paris would leave Paris in the summer and go to the countryside to escape the summer heat-this is undoubtedly the habit brought back by the nobles who had been exiled to England after the Great Revolution-and then returned in October. Back to Paris; at the end of October, when the Portuguese Moon ends and the Brumaire Moon begins, basically all the nobles return to Paris. At this time, according to the custom, prominent celebrities will take the lead in holding grand balls to mark the The whole social world starts up again.This kind of ball is also the time when the high society in Paris reaffirms their positions, and when the ladies and ladies who step into the social world for the first time make their official debut, so of course, every detail can't go wrong:

The clothes had to be ironed, and every tie and button was in its proper place—whether it was Alred's, Louis's, or Joseph's the valet;

Canes are sent to a cane shop for maintenance, and pocket watches and gold watch chains are sent to a watch shop to be cleaned to ensure their luster is a bright golden yellow;

The lining of the hat had to be replaced with a new one, and the shoes had to be polished not only with shoe polish mixed with white sugar, but also sprayed with cologne from the perfume shop;

The carriage that is ready to ride needs to be inspected and maintained, the wind lamp in front of the carriage must be cleaned, and the interior decoration must also be replaced with the latest popular style;

Even the horses pulling the cart enjoyed treatment that they could not normally enjoy—with the help of Papa Peter, they took a fragrant bath, and the ribbons that had not been tied on their ears for a long time were also removed. It was replaced by a new pink sash with a camellia.

Under the pretense that he needed to go out to deal with other things, Alrede cunningly used these trivial things to distract his friend's attention, so that Louis would not fall into a bad mood.And as one of his helpers, Marie did a great job of completing the tasks assigned to her by Alred—after discovering that Louis would never mention Villiers du Turner in front of her, she became sluggish again. Be generous, everything asked for instructions is very ingenious, so that Louis does not have too much time to think about Sologne and District No.12, and does not let him fall into new pressure and troubles because of excessive care.

"Suddenly I understand why Mr. Sologne Grostedt does not want to go to the ball, although I still do not agree with his idea of ​​selling Madame's invitation."

After being overwhelmed by trivial but necessary things, Louis complained to Alred like this.

In a sense, although the idea of ​​Sologne Grostedt to sell the ball invitations he received at the Vicomte de Bourgogne's house is not worth promoting, there is no doubt that this kind of Workarounds do save a whole host of problems—and the corresponding outlay—that go along with it.

"Well, that's the price of status, Louie!" Allred replied. "When everyone else does it, we have to do it, or we'll be seen as aliens."

When Alred said this, he was just trying to comfort his friends. Even he himself didn't expect that they actually saw in the Viscount de Boulogne's mansion that he was rejected by the upper class because he didn't understand the rules. Out of the "heterogeneous".

And it was a man they had met before—the student at the University of Paris, Villiers du Turner.

The invitation to the Vicomtesse de Bourgogne's ball stated the time at 09:30 that night, which was an impossibly late time for the provinces, but to the people of Paris it was just an ordinary ball It's just time to start.Because people with different identities arrive at a default first-come-first-served rule, the invitees with lower identities often need to arrive earlier. Alred and Louis started to take their two-seater four The carriage set off.

The de Bourgogne family has a long-standing reputation. The history of this family can be traced back to the era of the Sun King. Although there have been twists and turns in the middle, the family still maintained its lofty reputation and kept most of its assets during the Great Revolution. Like many aristocratic families that were destroyed during the Great Revolution, it fell just like this—just in this regard, this is already an achievement that is enough to make Alred's father, Count Fernand de Granville, extremely jealous.This family has several residences in Paris. This time, the Viscountess used the mansion in the Saint-Germain district for the first ball of the Brumaire. The suburb is close to the Tuileries Garden, a promenade that is as famous as the Bois de Boulogne. One of the most popular elegant residential areas for people, there are a lot of old aristocratic mansions there.

Although it was almost late at night, the coachman did not have to worry about not being able to find the way to the Viscount de Bougogne's mansion - after driving into the main road of the Saint-Germain district, all he saw was in the same direction The slow-moving luxury carriage only needs to follow the other carriages.However, unlike the Carrasch open carriage or Landau open carriage at the Opera House, the type of carriage that Louis saw this time was relatively monotonous—basically all Belly at a glance. Nu style box carriage, two-seater or four-seater carriage, if these carriages have any common features, they are probably all covered box carriages.

In the end, it was Alred who told Louis the little secret.

"The basic rule of going to the dance at night is that you can only take a covered box carriage. If you take a carriage other than this type, although the servants don't say it, they will secretly laugh at people who don't understand the rules, just like Laughing at people who go in a cab."

The horse-drawn carriage that Alred said refers to a short-term rental horse-drawn carriage that charges one to two francs per kilometer according to the distance. If it is rented on an annual basis, although it is also a rental horse-drawn carriage, it is classified as a private carriage. went.

"That's too much to ask! If the ladies in my hometown treat their guests like this, they probably won't be able to hold a ball for several years."

Louis thought about how many people could go there in a carriage when there was a dance in his hometown town, and came to the conclusion that if the initiators of the dance in Magon also adopted this standard, the whole Magon could participate decently. Even if all the gentlemen and ladies who are not laughed at at the ball are added up, it is not enough for eight people to dance a Quadrille.

"After all, this is Paris!"

Alred replied nonchalantly.

The mansion of the Viscount de Bougogne is a very magnificent building, a gorgeous palace-yes, the luxury of this mansion can only be described as a palace.It is more than ten meters high, and the whole body is white. Eight "Y"-shaped Greek-style marble pillars with arabesques stretching upward gracefully, supporting the main body of the building. Above the pillars are countless lifelike exquisite sculptures, forming a A gigantic relief of a hunt on horseback.It is amazing that the designer of the mansion used a very ingenious technique to seal as many as a dozen chandeliers of crystal gas lamps and place them in the gaps between the doorposts and reliefs. These gas lamps are surrounded by transparent glass, emitting The light diffused by the glass illuminated the entire front of the mansion as bright as day, it was a dreamlike scene.

Alred's carriage followed the others into the atrium of the majestic Bourgogne mansion. There were already countless carriages parked there, so they could only park under the porch at the back of the atrium.As soon as the carriage stopped, attendants wearing uniforms embroidered with the coat of arms of the De Bourgogne family came over immediately, opened the door of the carriage for them and lowered the steps of the carriage.

Louis handed the Viscountess' invitation letter to the entourage who opened the door for them, but the young entourage didn't take it, but just smiled at him.

"Sir, please give the invitation letter to the person who welcomes you later."

At this moment, another carriage approached here, and the attendant walked over immediately, ready to lower the steps for that carriage—it turned out that these attendants were only responsible for this one thing.

"The invitation letter should be delivered to the person in the entrance hall." Alred said to Louis, and he led Louis up the wide external staircase. At the end of the staircase are three connected luxury doors, all of which are open at this moment. Now, there are two greeters standing by each door.

This is not the person who is responsible for receiving the invitation letter. After entering the gate, there is a wide entrance hall with gorgeous chandeliers hanging from the ceiling supported by huge Ionian columns. The floor is pure white marble, reflecting the Dazzling light; all you see here are well-dressed gentlemen and ladies, the smell of good perfume permeates the air, and the gentlemen hold invitation letters in their hands, but there is no shadow of the owner—it turns out that this cloth The Gornie Mansion was designed as several connected halls, and this is just the outermost entrance hall.

From the entrance hall, there is a door decorated with olive branches and fig patterns leading to the second hall. The door is filled with decorative flowers. In the flower shop, they are guaranteed to be sold at a high price, but here they are just decorations in the outermost hall; on both sides of the door surrounded by flowers, there are attendants in neat uniforms and smiling faces. In the rear, at a table covered with a gold brocade tablecloth, sat the person who registered the returned invitations—this was where the guests handed over their invitations and entered the real ball hall.

Probably because the arrival time of this group of guests was relatively close, there were no less than twenty gentlemen who received the invitation and ladies in gorgeous clothes standing in the entrance hall, which made the person in charge of registration a little flustered for a while.

Louis looked at this magnificent and dazzling entrance hall with great interest. He noticed that the top of the entrance hall was a transparent glass window. It seemed that people on the second floor of the second hall could look down on the people in the entrance hall through the glass window. The effect must have been like watching the stage from the second floor of a theater; he also noticed the other guests' attire, and found that the gentlemen mostly wore dark blue or dark black hats, trousers and coats like them, while the ladies were A low-cut evening dress with a long pleated skirt, a sparkling diamond necklace around the neck, and a fan in the hand wearing white or beige gloves-it seems that for women, dresses, diamonds and fans are all important. It is an essential part, and it costs them far more than gentlemen to attend the ball.

While observing the people ahead of them due to their early arrival, Louis suddenly saw the figure of Villiers du Turner whom he had seen before.

For a moment, Louis almost screamed out. He thought he had misjudged the person, so he pushed Alred lightly.