He repeated to himself, as he tied his white tie before his little looking-glass: “I must write to father tomorrow. Wouldn’t the old fellow be staggered if he could see me this evening in the house I am going to? By Jove! I am going to have such a dinner as he never tasted.” And he suddenly saw the dark kitchen behind the empty café; the copper stewpans casting their yellow reflections on the wall; the cat on the hearth, with her nose to the fire, in sphinx-like attitude; the wooden table, greasy with time and spilt liquids, a soup tureen smoking upon it, and a lighted candle between two plates. He saw them, too—his father and mother, two slow-moving peasants, eating their soup. He knew the smallest wrinkles on their old faces, the slightest movements of their arms and heads. He knew even what they talked about every evening as they sat at supper. He thought, too: “I must really go and see them;” but his toilet being ended, he blew out his light and went downstairs.
As he passed along the outer boulevard girls accosted him from time to time. He replied, as he pulled away his arm: “Go to the devil!” with a violent disdain, as though they had insulted him. What did they take him for? Could not these hussies tell what a man was? The sensation of his dress coat, put on in order to go to dinner with such well-known and important people, inspired him with the sentiment of a new impersonality—the sense of having become another man, a man in society, genuine society.
He entered the anteroom, lit by tall bronze candelabra, with confidence, and handed in easy fashion his cane and overcoat to two valets who approached. All the drawing-rooms were lit up. Madame Walter received her guests in the second, the largest. She welcomed him with a charming smile, and he shook hands with two gentlemen who had arrived before him—Monsieur Firmin and Monsieur Laroche-Mathieu, deputies, and