The American
VI.
NEWMAN gave up Damascus and Bagdad, and returned to Paris before the autumn was over. He established himself in some rooms selected for him by Tom Tristram, in accordance with the latter’s estimate of what he called his social position. When Newman learned that his social position was to be taken into account, he professed himself utterly incompetent, and begged Tristram to relieve him of the care. “I didn’t know I had a social position,” he said, “and if I have, I haven’t the smallest idea what it is. Isn’t a social position knowing some two or three thousand people and inviting them to dinner? I know you and your wife and little old Mr. Nioche, who gave me French lessons last spring. Can I invite you to dinner to meet each other? If I can, you must come to-morrow.”
“ That is not very grateful to me,” said Mrs. Tristram, “ who introduced you last year to every creature I know.”
“ So you did ; I had quite forgotten. But I thought you wanted me to forget,” said Newman, with that tone of simple deliberateness which frequently masked his utterance, and which an observer would not have known whether to pronounce a somewhat mysteriously humorous affectation of ignorance, or a modest aspiration to knowledge; “you told me you disliked them all.”
“ Ah, the way you remember what I say is at least very flattering! But in future,” added Mrs. Tristram, “ pray forget all the wicked things and remember only the good ones. It will be easily done, and it will not fatigue your memory. But I forewarn you that if you trust my husband to pick out your rooms, you are in for something hideous.”
“ Hideous, darling? ” cried Tristram.
“ To-day I must say nothing wicked; otherwise I should use stronger language.”
“What do you think she would say, Newman?” asked Tristram. “If she really tried, now? She can express displeasure, volubly, in two or three languages; that’s what it is to be intellectual. It gives her the start of me completely, for I can’t swear, for the life of me, except in English. When J get mad I have to fall back on our dear old mother tongue. There’s nothing like it, after all. ”
Newman declared that he knew nothing about tables and chairs, and that he would accept, in the way of a lodging, with his eyes shut, anything that Tristram should offer him. This was partly pure veracity on our hero’s part, but it was also partly charity. He knew that to pry about and look at rooms, and make people open windows, and poke into sofas with his cane, and gossip with landladies, and ask who lived above and who below, — he knew that this was of all pastimes the dearest to Tristram’s heart, and he felt the more disposed to put it in his way as he was conscious that, as regards his obliging friend, he had suffered the warmth of ancient good - fellowship somewhat to abate. Besides, he had no taste for upholstery; he had even no very exquisite sense of comfort or convenience. He had a relish for luxury and splendor, but it was satisfied by rather gross contrivances. He scarcely knew a hard chair from a soft one, and he possessed a talent for stretching his legs which quite dispensed with adventitious facilities. His idea of comfort was to inhabit very large rooms, have a great many of them, and be conscious of their possessing a number of patented mechanical devices, — half of which he should never have occasion to use. The apartments should be light and brilliant and lofty; he had once said that he liked rooms in which you wanted to keep your hat on. For the rest, he was satisfied with the assurance of any respectable person that everything was “ handsome.” Tristram accordingly secured for him an apartment to which this epithet might be lavishly applied. It was situated on the Boulevard Hausmann, on a first floor, and consisted of a series of rooms, gilded, from floor to ceiling, a foot thick, draped in various light shades of satin, and chiefly furnished with mirrors and clocks. Newman thought them magnificent, thanked Tristram heartily, immediately took possession, and had one of his trunks standing for three months in his drawingroom.
One day Mrs. Tristram told him that her beautiful friend, Madame de Cintré, had returned from the country; that she had met her three days before, coming out of the Church of St. Sulpice; she herself having journeyed to that distant quarter in quest of an obscure lacemender, of whose skill she had heard high praise.
“ And how were those eyes? ” Newman asked.
“ Those eyes were red with weeping, if you please !” said Mrs. Tristram. “ She had been to confession.”
“It doesn’t tally with your account of her,” said Newman, “ that she should have sins to confess.”
“ They were not sins; they were sufferings.”
“ How do you know that? ”
“ She asked me to come and see her; I went this morning.”
“ And what does she suffer from? ”
“ I did n’t ask her. With her, somehow, one is very discreet. But I guessed, easily enough. She suffers from her wicked old mother and her Grand Turk of a brother. They persecute her. But I can almost forgive them, because, as I told you, she is a saint, and a persecution is all that she needs to bring out her saintliness and make her perfect.”
“ That’s a comfortable theory for her. I hope you will never impart it to the old folks. Why does she let them bully her? Is she not her own mistress.”
“ Legally, yes, I suppose; but morally, no. In France you must never say nay to your mother, whatever she requires of you. She may be the most unreasonable old woman in the world, and make your life a purgatory; but, after all, she is ma mère, and you have no right to judge her. You have simply to obey. The thing has a fine side to it. Madame de Cintré bows her head and folds her wings.”
‘ ‘ Can’t she at least make her brother leave off ? ”
“ Her brother is the chef de la famille, as they say; he is the head of the clan. With those people the family is everything; you must act, not for your own pleasure, but for the advantage of the family.”
“ I wonder what my family would like me to do! ” exclaimed Tristram.
“ I wish you had one! ” said his wife.
“But what do they want to get out of that poor lady? ” Newman asked.
“ Another marriage. They are not rich, and they want to bring more money into the family. ”
“There’s your chance, my boy!” said Tristram.
“And Madame de Cintré objects,” Newman continued.
“ She has been sold once; she naturally objects to being sold again. It appears that the first time they made rather a poor bargain; M. de Cintré left a scanty property.”
“ And to whom do they want to marry her now ? ”
“I thought it best not to ask; but you may be sure it is to some horrid old nabob, or to some dissipated little duke. ”
“ There’s Mrs. Tristram, as large as life!” cried her husband. “Observe the richness of her imagination. She has not asked a single question, — it’s vulgar to ask questions, — and yet she knows everything. She has the history of Madame de Cintré’s marriage at her fingers’ ends. She has seen the lovely Claire on her knees, with loosened tresses and streaming eyes, and the rest of them standing over her with spikes and goads and red-hot irons, ready to come down on her if she refuses the tipsy duke. The simple truth is that they have made a fuss about her milliner’s bill, or refused her an opera-box.”
Newman looked from Tristram to his wife with a certain mistrust in each direction. “ Do you really mean,” he asked of Mrs. Tristram, “that your friend is being forced into an unhappy marriage ? ”
“ I think it extremely probable. Those people are very capable of that sort of thing. ”
“ It is like something in a play,” said Newman; “ that dark old house over there looks as if wicked things had been done in it, and might be done again.”
“ They have a still darker old house in the country, Madame de Cintré tells me, and there, during the summer, this scheme must have been hatched.”
“ Must have been; mind that! ” said Tristram.
“ After all,” suggested Newman, after a silence, “ she may be in trouble about something else.”
“If it is something else, then it is something worse,” said Mrs. Tristram, with rich decision.
Newman was silent a while, and seemed lost in meditation. “ Is it possible,” he asked at last, “ that they do that sort of thing over here? that helpless women are bullied into marrying men they hate? ”
“ Helpless women, all over the world, have a hard time of it,” said Mrs. Tristram. “ There is plenty of bullying everywhere,”
“ A great deal of that kind of thing goes on in New York,” said Tristram. “ Girls are bullied or coaxed or bribed, or all three together, into marrying nasty fellows. There is no end of that always going on in the Fifth Avenue, and other bad things besides. The Mysteries of the Fifth Avenue! Some one ought to show them up.”
“I don’t believe it! ” said Newman, very gravely. “I don’t believe that, in America, girls are ever subjected to compulsion. I don’t believe there have been a dozen cases of it since the country began.”
“ Listen to the voice of the spread eagle!” cried Tristram.
“ The spread eagle ought to use his wings,” said Mrs. Tristram. “ Fly to the rescue of Madame de Cintré! ”
“ To her rescue? ”
“ Pounce down, seize her in your talons, and carry her off. Marry her yourself.”
Newman, for some moments, answered nothing; but presently, “I should suppose she had heard enough of marrying,” he said. “ The kindest way to treat her would be to admire her, and yet never to speak of it. But that sort of thing is infamous,” he added; “it makes me feel savage to hear of it.”
He heard of it, however, more than once afterward. Mrs. Tristram again saw Madame de Cintré, and again found her looking very sad. But on these occasions there had been no tears; her beautiful eyes were clear and still. “ She is cold, calm, and hopeless,” Mrs. Tristram declared, and she added that on her mentioning that her friend, Mr. Newman, was again in Paris, and was faithful in his desire to make Madame de Cintré’s acquaintance, this lovely woman had found a smile in her despair, and declared that she was sorry to have missed his visit in the spring, and that she hoped he had not lost courage. “ I told her something about you,” said Mrs. Tristram.
“ That’s a comfort,” said Newman, placidly. “ I like people to know about me.”
A few days after this, one dusky autumn afternoon, he went again to the Rue de l’Université. The early evening had closed in as he applied for admittance at the stoutly guarded Hôtel de Bellegarde. He was told that Madame do Cintré was at home; he crossed the court, entered the farther door, and was conducted through a vestibule, vast, dim, and cold, up a broad stone staircase with an ancient iron balustrade, to an apartment on the second floor. Announced and ushered in, he found himself in a sort of paneled boudoir, at one end of which a lady and gentleman were seated before the fire. The gentleman was smoking; there was no light in the room save that of a couple of candles and the glow from the hearth. Both persons rose to welcome Newman, who, in the firelight, recognized Madame de Cintré. She gave him her hand with a smile which seemed in itself an illumination, and, pointing to her companion, said softly, “ My brother.”The gentleman offered Newman a frank, friendly greeting, and our hero then perceived him to be the young man who had spoken to him in the court of the hotel on his former visit, and who had struck him as a good fellow.
“ Mrs. Tristram has spoken to me a great deal of you,” said Madame de Cintré gently, as she resumed her former place.
Newman, after he had seated himself, began to consider what, in truth, was his errand. He had an unusual, unexpected sense of having wandered into a strange corner of the world. He was not given, as a general thing, to anticipating danger, or forecasting disaster, and he had had no social tremors on this particular occasion. He was not timid and he was not impudent. He felt too kindly toward himself to be the one, and too good-naturedly toward the rest of the world to be the other. But his native shrewdness sometimes placed his ease of temper at its mercy; with every disposition to take things simply, it was obliged to perceive that some things were not so simple as others. He felt as one does in missing a step, in an ascent, where one expected to find it. This strange, pretty woman, sitting in fireside talk with her brother, in the gray depths of her inhospitable-looking house — what had he to say to her? She seemed enveloped in a sort of fantastic privacy; on what grounds had he pulled away the curtain? For a moment he felt as if he had plunged into some medium as deep as the ocean, and as if he must exert himself to keep from sinking. Meanwhile he was looking at Madame de Cintré, and she was settling herself in her chair and drawing in her long dress and turning her face towards him. Their eyes met; a moment afterwards she looked away and motioned to her brother to put a log on the fire. But the moment, and the glance which traversed it, had been sufficient to relieve Newman of the first and the last fit of personal embarrassment he was ever to know. He performed the movement which was so frequent with him, and which was always a sort of symbol of his taking mental possession of a scene — he extended his legs. The impression Madame de Cintré had made upon him on their first meeting came back in an instant; it had been deeper than he knew. She was pleasing, she was interesting; he had opened a book and the first lines held his attention.
She asked him several questions: how lately he had seen Mrs. Tristram, how long he had been in Paris, how long he expected to remain there, how he liked it. She spoke English without an accent, or rather with that distinctively British accent which, on his arrival in Europe, had struck Newman as an altogether foreign tongue, but which, in women, he had come to like extremely. Here and there Madame de Cintré’s utterance had a faint shade of strangeness, but at the end of ten minutes Newman found himself waiting for these soft roughnesses. He enjoyed them, and he marveled to see that gross thing, error, brought down to so fine a point.
“You have a beautiful country!” said Madame de Cintré, presently.
“ Oh, magnificent! ” said Newman. “ You ought to see it.”
“ I shall never see it,” said Madame de Cintré, with a smile.
“ Why not? ” asked Newman.
“ I don’t travel; especially so far.”
“ But you go away sometimes; you are not always here? ”
“I go away in summer, a little way, to the country.”
Newman wanted to ask her something more, something personal, he hardly knew what. “ Don’t you find it rather — rather quiet here?” he said; “so far from the street? ” Rather “ gloomy,” he was going to say, but he reflected that that would be impolite.
“ Yes, it is very quiet,” said Madame de Cintré; “ but we like that.”
“ Ah, you like that,” repeated Newman, slowly.
“ Besides, I have lived here all my life.”
“ Lived here all your life,” said Newman, in the same way.
“ I was born here, and my father was born here before me, and my grandfather, and my great-grandfathers. Were they not, Valentin?” and she appealed to her brother.
“ Yes, it’s a family habit to be born here! ” the young man said with a laugh, and rose and threw the remnant of his cigar into the fire, and then remained leaning against the chimney-piece. An observer would have perceived that he wished to take a better look at Newman, whom he covertly examined, while he stood stroking his mustache.
“ Your house is tremendously old, then,” said Newman.
“ How old is it, brother? ” asked Madame de Cintré.
The young man took the two candles from the mantel-shelf, lifted one high in each hand, and looked up toward the cornice of the room, above the chimney-piece. This latter feature of the apartment was of white marble, and in the familiar rococo style of the last century; but above it was a paneling of an earlier date, quaintly carved, painted white, and gilded here and there. The white had turned to yellow, and the gilding was tarnished. On the top, the figures ranged themselves into a sort of shield, on which an armorial device was cut. Above it, in relief, was a date— 1627. “ There you have it,” said the young man. “ That is old or new, according to your point of view.”
“ Well, over here,” said Newman, “one’s point of view gets shifted round considerably.” And he threw back his head and looked about the room. “ Your house is of a very curious style of architecture,” he said.
“ Are you interested in architecture? ” asked the young man at the chimneypiece.
“ Well, I took the trouble, this summer,” said Newman, “ to examine — as well as I can calculate — some four hundred and seventy churches. Do you call that interested? ”
“ Perhaps you are interested in theology,” said the young man.
“ Not particularly. Are you a Roman Catholic, madam ? " And he turned to Madame de Cintré.
“ Yes, sir,” she answered, gravely.
Newman was struck with the gravity of her tone; he threw back his head and began to look round the room again. “ Had you never noticed that number up there? ” he presently asked.
She hesitated a moment, and then, “ In former years,” she said.
Her brother had been watching Newman’s movement. “ Perhaps you would like to examine the house,” he said.
Newman slowly brought down his eyes and looked at him; he had a vague impression that the young man at the chimney - piece was inclined to irony. He was a handsome fellow, his face wore a smile, his mustaches were curled up at the ends, and there was a little dancing gleam in his eye. “Damn his French impudence! ” Newman was on the point of saying to himself. “ What the deuce is he grinning at? ” He glanced at Madame de Cintré; she was sitting with her eyes fixed on the floor. She raised them, they met his, and she looked at her brother. Newman turned again to this young man and observed that he strikingly resembled his sister. This was in his favor, and our hero’s first impression of the Count Valentin, moreover, had been agreeable. His mistrust expired, and he said he would be very glad to see the house.
The young man gave a frank laugh, and laid his hand on one of the candlesticks. “ Good, good! ” he exclaimed. “ Come, then.”
But Madame de Cintré rose quickly and grasped his arm. “ Ah, Valentin!” she said. “What do you mean to do? ”
“ To show Mr. Newman the house. It will be very amusing,”
She kept her hand on his arm, and turned to Newman with a smile. " Don’t let him take you,” she said; “you will not find it amusing. It is a musty old house, like any other.”
“ It is full of curious things,” said the count, resisting. “ Besides, I want to do it; it is a rare chance.”
“ You are very wicked, brother,” Madame de Cintré answered.
“Nothing venture, nothing have!” cried the young man, “ Will you come ? ”
Madame de Cintré stepped toward Newman, gently clasping her hands and smiling softly. “ Would you not prefer my society, here, by my fire, to stumbling about dark passages after my brother? ”
“ A hundred times! ” said Newman. “ We will see the house some other day.”
The young man put down his candlestick with mock solemnity, and, shaking his head, “ Ah, you have defeated a great scheme, sir! ” he said.
“ A scheme? I don’t understand,” said Newman.
“ You would have played your part in it all the better. Perhaps some day I shall have a chance to explain it.”
“ Be quiet, and ring for the tea,” said Madame de Cintré.
The young man obeyed, and presently a servant brought in the tea, placed the tray on a small table, and departed. Madame de Cintré, from her place, busied herself with making it. She had but just begun when the door was thrown open and a lady rushed in, making a loud rustling sound. She stared at Newman, gave a little nod and a “ Monsieur ! ” and then quickly approached Madame de Cintré and presented her forehead to be kissed. Madame de Cintré saluted her, and continued to make tea. The new-comer was young and pretty, it seemed to Newman; she wore her bonnet and cloak, and a train of royal proportions. She began to talk rapidly in French. “ Oh, give me some tea, my beautiful one, for the love of God! I’m exhausted, mangled, massacred.” Newman found himself quite unable to follow her; she spoke much less distinctly than M. Nioche.
“ That is my sister-in-law,” said the Count Valentin, leaning towards him.
“ She is very pretty,” said Newman.
“ Exquisite,” answered the young man, and this time, again, Newman suspected him of irony.
His sister-in-law came round to the other side of the fire with her cup of tea in her hand, holding it out at armslength, so that she might not spill it on her dress, and uttering little cries of alarm. She placed the cup on the mantel-shelf and began to unpin her veil and pull off her gloves, looking meanwhile at Newman.
“ Is there anything I can do for you, my dear lady? ” the Count Valentin asked, in a sort of mock-caressing tone.
“Present monsieur,” said his sisterin-law.
The young man answered, “ Mr. Newman! ”
“I can’t courtesy to you, monsieur, or I shall spill my tea,” said the lady. “So Claire receives strangers, like that?” she added, in a low voice, in French, to her brother-in-law.
“ Apparently! ” he answered with a smile. Newman stood a moment, and then he approached Madame de Cintré. She looked up at him as if she were thinking of something to say. But she seemed to think of nothing; so she simply smiled. He sat down near her and she handed him a cup of tea. For a few moments they talked about that, and meanwhile he looked at her. He remembered what Mrs. Tristram had told him of her “perfection,” and of her having, in combination, all the brilliant things that he dreamed of finding. This made him observe her not only without mistrust, but without uneasy conjectures; the presumption, from the first moment he looked at her, had been in her favor. And yet, if she was beautiful, it was not a dazzling beauty. She was tall and molded in long lines; she had thick, fair hair, a wide forehead, and features with a sort of harmonious irregularity. Her clear gray eyes were strikingly expressive ; they were both gentle and intelligent, and Newman liked them immensely ; but they had not those depths of splendor—those many-colored rays — which illumine the brow of famous beauties. Madame de Cintré was rather thin, and she looked younger than probably she was. In her whole person there was something both youthful and subdued, slender and yet ample, tranquil yet shy; a mixture of immaturity and repose, of innocence and dignity. What had Tristram meant, Newman wondered, by calling her proud? She was certainly not proud now, to him; or if she was, it was of no use, it was lost upon him; she must pile it up higher if she expected him to mind it. She was a beautiful woman, and it was very easy to get on with her. Was she a countess, a marquise, a kind of historical formation? Newman, who had rarely heard these words used, had never been at pains to attach any particular image to them; but they occurred to him now and seemed charged with a sort of melodious meaning. They signified something fair and softly bright, that had easy motions and spoke very agreeably.
“ Have you many friends in Paris; do you go out? ” asked Madame de Cintré, who had at last thought of something to say.
“ Do you mean do I dance, and all that? ”
“Do you go dans le monde, as we say ?”
“ I have seen a good many people. Mrs. Tristram has taken me about. I do whatever she tells me.”
“ By yourself, you are not fond of amusements? ”
“ Oh yes, of some sorts. I am not fond of dancing, and that sort of thing; I am too old and sober. But I want to be amused; I came to Europe for that.”
“ But you can be amused in America, too.”
“ I couldn’t; I was always at work. But after all, that was my amusement.”
At this moment Madame de Bellegarde came back for another cup of tea, accompanied by the Count Valentin. Madame de Cintré, when she had served her, began to talk again with Newman, and recalling what he had last said, “In your own country you were very much occupied?” she asked.
“ I was in business. I have been in business since I was fifteen years old.”
“And what was your business?” asked Madame de Bellegarde, who was decidedly not so pretty as Madame de Cintré.
“I have been in everything,” said Newman. “ At one time I sold leather; at one time I manufactured washtubs.”
Madame de Bellegarde made a little grimace. “Leather? I don’t like that. Wash-tubs are better. I prefer the smell of soap. I hope at least they made your fortune.” She rattled this off with the air of a woman who had the reputation of saying everything that came into her head, and with a strong French accent.
Newman had spoken with cheerful seriousness, but Madame de Bellegarde’s tone made him go on, after a meditative pause, with a certain light grimness of jocularity. “ No, I lost money on washtubs, but I came out pretty square on leather. ”
“ I have made up my mind, after all,” said Madame de Bellegarde, “that the great point is — how do you call it? — to come out square. I am on my knees to money; I don’t deny it. If you have it, I ask no questions. For that I am a real democrat — like you, monsieur. Madame de Cintré is very proud; but I find that one gets much more pleasure in this sad life if one does n’t look too close.”
“Just Heaven, dear madam, how you go at it,” said the Count Valentin, lowering his voice.
“He’s a man one can speak to, I suppose, since my sister receives him,” the lady answered. “ Besides, it’s very true; those are my ideas.”
“ Ah, you call them ideas,” murmured the young man.
“ But Mrs. Tristram told me you had been in the army — in your war,” said Madame de Cintré.
“ Yes, but that is not business! ” said Newman.
“ Very true! ” said M. de Bellegarde. “ Otherwise perhaps I should not be penniless.”
“Is it true,” asked Newman in a moment, “that you are so proud? I had already heard it.”
Madame de Cintré smiled. “ Do you find, me so? ”
“Oh,” said Newman, “I am no judge. If you are proud with me, you will have to tell me. Otherwise I shall not know it.”
Madame de Cintré began to laugh. “ That would be pride in a sad position !" she said.
“ It would be partly,” Newman went on, “ because I should n’t want to know it. I want you to treat me well.”
Madame de Cintré, whose laugh had ceased, looked at him with her head half averted, as if she feared what he was going to say.
“Mrs. Tristram told you the literal truth,” he went on; “I want very much to know you. I did n’t come here simply to call to-day; I came in the hope that you might ask me to come again.”
“ Oh, pray come often,” said Madame de Cintré.
“But will you beat home?” Newman insisted. Even to himself he seemed a trifle “ pushing,” but he was, in truth, a trifle excited.
“ I hope so!” said Madame de Cintré.
Newman got up. “Well, we shall see,” he said, smoothing his hat with his coat-cuff.
“ Brother,” said Madame de Cintré, “ invite Mr. Newman to come again.”
The Count Valentin looked at our hero from head to foot with his peculiar smile, in which impudence and urbanity seemed perplexingly commingled. “ Are you a brave man?” he asked, eying him askance.
“ Well, I hope so,” said Newman.
“ I rather suspect so. In that case, come again.”
“Ah, what an invitation!” murmured Madame de Cintré, with something painful in her smile.
“ Oh, I want Mr. Newman to come — particularly,” said the young man. “ It will give me great pleasure. I shall be desolate if I miss one of his visits. But 1 maintain he must be brave. A stout heart, sir!” And he offered Newman his hand.
“I shall not come to see you; I shall come to see Madame de Cintré,” said Newman.
“ You will need all the more courage.”
“Ah, Valentin!” said Madame de Cintré, appealingly.
“ Decidedly,” cried Madame de Bellegarde, “I am the only person here capable of saying something polite! Come to see me; you will need no courage,” she said.
Newman gave a laugh which was not altogether an assent, and took his leave. Madame de Cintré did not take up her sister’s challenge to be gracious, but she looked with a certain troubled air at the retreating guest.
VII.
One evening, very late, about a week after his visit to Madame de Cintré, Newman’s servant brought him a card. It was that of young M. de Bellegarde. When, a few moments later, he went to receive his visitor, he found him standing in the middle of his great gilded parlor and eying it from cornice to carpet. M. de Bellegarde’s face, it seemed to Newman, expressed a sense of lively entertainment. “ What the devil is he laughing at now? ” our hero asked himself. But he put the question without acrimony, for he felt that Madame de Cintré’s brother was a good fellow, and he had a presentiment that on this basis of good fellowship they were destined to understand each other. Only, if there was anything to laugh at, he wished to have a glimpse of it too.
“ To begin with,” said the young man, as he extended his hand, “have I come too late? ”
“ Too late for what? ” asked Newman.
“ To smoke a cigar with you.”
“ You would have to come early to do that,” said Newman. “ I don’t smoke.”
“ Ah, you are a strong man!”
“ But I keep cigars,” Newman added. “ Sit down.”
“ Surely, I may not smoke here,” said M. de Bellegarde.
“ What is the matter? Is the room too small? ”
“It is too large. It is like smoking in a ball-room, or a church.”
“ That is what you were laughing at just now? ” Newman asked; “ the size of my room? ”
“It is not size only,” replied M. de Bellegarde, “but splendor, and harmony, and beauty of detail. It was the smile of admiration.”
Newman looked at him a moment, and then, “ So it is very ugly? ” he inquired.
“Ugly, my dear sir? It is magnificent.”
“ That is the same thing, I suppose,” said Newman. “ Make yourself comfortable. Your coming to see me, I take it, is an act of friendship. You were not obliged to. Therefore, if anything around here amuses you, it will be all in a pleasant way. Laugh as loud as you please; I like to see my visitors cheerful. Only, I must make this request: that you explain the joke to me as soon as you can speak. I don’t want to lose anything, myself.”
M. de Bellegarde stared, with a look of unresentful perplexity. He laid his hand on Newman’s sleeve and seemed on the point of saying something, but he suddenly checked himself, leaned back in his chair, and puffed at his cigar. At last, however, breaking silence, — “ Certainly,” he said, “ my coming to see you is an act of friendship. Nevertheless, I was in a measure obliged to do so. My sister asked me to come, and a request from my sister is, for me, a law. I was near you, and I observed lights in what I supposed were your rooms. It was not a ceremonious hour for making a call, but I was not sorry to do something that would show I was not performing a mere ceremony.”
“ Well, here I am, as large as life,” said Newman, extending his legs.
“ I don’t know what you mean,” the young man went on, “ by giving me unlimited leave to laugh. Certainly, I am a great laugher, and it is better to laugh too much than too little. But it is not in order that we may laugh together — or separately — that I have, I may say, sought your acquaintance. To speak with almost impudent frankness, you interest me.” All this was uttered by M. de Bellegarde with the modulated smoothness of the man of the world, and, in spite of his excellent English, of the Frenchman; but Newman, at the same time that he sat noting its harmonious flow, perceived that it was not mere mechanical urbanity. Decidedly, there was something in his visitor that he liked. M. de Bellegarde was a foreigner to his finger-tips, and it Newman had met him on a Western prairie he would have felt it proper to address him with a “ How-d’ye-do, Mosseer? ” But there was something in his physiognomy which seemed to cast a sort of aerial bridge over the impassable gulf produced by difference of race. He was below the middle height, and robust and agile in figure. Valentin de Bellegarde, Newman afterwards learned, had a mortal dread of the robustness overtaking the agility; he was afraid of growing stout; he was too short, as he said, to afford a belly. He rode and fenced and practiced gymnastics with unremitting zeal, and if you greeted him with a “ How well you are looking!” he started and turned pale. In your well he read a grosser monosyllable. He had a round head, high above the ears, a crop of hair at once dense and silky, a broad, low forehead, a short nose, of the ironical and inquiring rather than of the dogmatic or sensitive cast, and a mustache as delicate as that of a page in a romance. He resembled his sister not in feature, but in the expression of his clear, bright eye, completely void of introspection, and in the way he smiled. The great point in his face was that it was intensely alive,— frankly, ardently, gallantly alive. The look of it was like a bell, of which the handle might have been in the young man’s soul: at a touch of the handle it rang with a loud, silver sound. There was something in his quick, light brown eye which assured you that he was not economizing his consciousness. He was not living in a corner of it to spare the furniture of the rest. He was squarely encamped in the centre, and he was keeping open house. When he smiled, it was like the movement of a persor who in pouring out of a cup turns it upside down: he gave you the last drop of his jollity. He inspired Newman with something of the same kindness that our hero used to feel in his earlier years for those of his companions who could perform strange and clever tricks —make their joints crack in queer places or whistle at the back of their months.
“My sister told me,” M. de Bellegarde continued, “ that I ought to come and remove the impression that I had taken such great pains to produce upon you, the impression that I am a lunatic. Did it strike you that I behaved very oddly the other day? ”
“ Rather so,” said Newman.
“ So my sister tells me.” And M. de Bellegarde watched his host for a moment through his smoke-wreaths. “ If that is the case, I think we had better let it stand. I did n’t try to make you think I was a lunatic, at all; on the contrary, I wanted to produce a favorable impression. But if, after all, I made a fool of myself, it was the intention of Providence. I should injure myself by protesting too much, for I should seem to set up a claim for wisdom which, in the sequel of our acquaintance, I could by no means justify. Set me down as a lunatic with intervals of sanity.”
“ Oh, I guess you know what you are about,” said Newman.
“When I am sane, I am very sane; that I admit,” M. de Bellegarde answered. “But I didn’t come here to talk about myself. I should like to ask you a few questions. You allow me? ”
“ Give me a specimen,” said Newman.
“ You live here all alone? ”
“ Absolutely. With whom should I live? ”
“ For the moment,” said M. de Bellegarde with a smile, “ I am asking questions, not answering them. You have come to Paris for your pleasure? ”
Newman was silent a while. Then, at last, “Every one asks me that! ” he said with his mild slowness. “ It sounds so awfully foolish.”
“ But at any rate you had a reason.”
“ Oh, I came for my pleasure! ” said Newman. “ Though it is foolish, it is true.”
“ And you are enjoying it? ”
Like any other good American, Newman thought it as well not to truckle to the foreigner. “Oh, so-so,” he answered.
M. de Bellegarde puffed his cigar again in silence. “For myself,” he said at last, “ I am entirely at your service. Anything I can do for you I shall be very happy to do. Call upon me at your convenience. Is there any one you desire to know — anything you wish to see? It is a pity you should not enjoy Paris.”
“ Oh, I do enjoy it! ” said Newman, good-naturedly. “I’m much obliged to you.”
“Honestly speaking,” M. de Bellegarde went on, “ there is something absurd to me in hearing myself make you these offers. They represent a great deal of good-will, but they represent little else. You are a successful man and I am a failure, and it’s a turning of the tables to talk as if I could lend you a hand.”
“ In what way are you a failure? ” asked Newman.
“ Oh, I’m not a tragical failure! ” cried the young man with a laugh. “ I have not fallen from a height, and my fiasco has made no noise. You, evidently, are a success. You have made a fortune, you have built up an edifice, you are a financial, commercial power, you can travel about the world until you have found a soft spot, and lie down in it with the consciousness of having earned your rest. Is not that true? Well, imagine the exact reverse of all that, and you have me. I have done nothing—I can do nothing! ”
“ Why not? ”
“ It ’s a long story. Some day I will tell you. Meanwhile, I’m right, eh? You are a success ? You have made a fortune? It’s none of my business, but, in short, you are rich? ”
“ That’s another thing that it sounds foolish to say,” said Newman. “ Hang it, no man is rich! ”
“I have heard philosophers affirm,” laughed M. de Bellegarde, “that no man was poor; but your formula strikes me as an improvement. As a general thing, I confess, I don’t like successful people, and I find clever men who have made great fortunes very offensive. They tread on my toes; they make me uncomfortable. But as soon as I saw you, I said to myself, ‘Ah, there is a man with whom I shall get on. He has the good-nature of success and none of the morgue ; he has not our confoundedly irritable French vanity.’ In short, I took a fancy to you. We are very different, I’m sure; I don’t believe there is a subject on which we think or feel alike. But I rather think we shall get on, for there is such a thing, you know, as being too different to quarrel.”
“ Oh, I never quarrel,” said Newman.
“Never? Sometimes it’s a duty — or at least it’s a pleasure. Oh, I have had two or three delicious quarrels in my day! ” and M. de Bellegarde’s handsome smile assumed, at the memory of these incidents, an almost voluptuous intensity.
With the preamble embodied in his share of the foregoing fragment of dialogue, he paid our hero a long visit; as the two men sat with their heels on Newman’s glowing hearth, they heard the small hours of the morning striking larger from a far-off belfry. Valentin de Bellegarde was, by his own confession, at all times a great chatterer, and on this occasion he was evidently in a particularly loquacious mood. It was a tradition of his race that people of its blood always conferred a favor by their smiles, and as his enthusiasms were as rare as his civility was constant, he had a double reason for not suspecting that his friendship could ever be importunate. Moreover, the flower of an ancient stem as he was, tradition (since I have used the word) had in his temperament nothing of disagreeable rigidity. It was muffled in sociability and urbanity, as an old dowager in her laces and strings of pearls. Valentin was what is called in France a gentilhomme, of the purest source, and his rule of life, so far as it was definite, was to play the part of a gentilhomme. This, it seemed to him, was enough to occupy comfortably a young man of ordinary good parts. But all that he was he was by instinct and not by theory, and the amiability of his character was so great that certain of the aristocratic virtues, which in some aspects seem rather brittle and trenchant, acquired in his application of them an extreme friendliness and bonhomie. In his younger years he had been suspected of low tastes, and his mother had greatly feared he would make a slip in the mud of the highway and bespatter the family shield. He had been treated, therefore, to more than his share of schooling and drilling, but his instructors had not succeeded in mounting him upon stilts. They could not spoil his safe spontaneity, and he remained the least cautious and the most lucky of young nobles. He had been tied with so short a rope in his youth that he had now a mortal grudge against family discipline. He had been known to say, within the limits of the family, that, light-headed as he was, the honor of the name was safer in his hands than in those of some of its other members, and that if a day ever came to try it, they would see. His talk was an odd mixture of almost boyish garrulity and of the reserve and discretion of the man of the world, and he seemed to Newman, as afterwards young members of the Latin races often seemed to him, now amusingly juvenile and now appallingly mature. In America, Newman reflected, lads of twenty-five and thirty have old heads and young hearts, or at least young morals; here they have young heads and very aged hearts, morals the most grizzled and wrinkled.
“ What I envy you is your liberty,” said M. de Bellegarde, “ your wide range, your freedom to come and go, your not having a lot of people, who take themselves awfully seriously, expecting something of you. I live,” he added with a sigh, “ beneath the eyes of my admirable mother.”
“ It is your own fault; what is to hinder your ranging? ” asked Newman.
“ There is a delightful simplicity in that remark! Everything is to hinder me, To begin with, I have not a penny.”
“ I had not a penny when I began to range.”
“ Ah, but your poverty was your capital. Being an American, it was impossible you should remain what you were born, and being born poor — do I understand it? — it was therefore inevitable that you should become rich. You were in a position that makes one’s mouth water; you looked round you and saw a world full of things you had only to step up to and take hold of. When I was twenty, I looked around me and saw a world with everything ticketed ‘Hands off! ’ and the deuce of it was that the ticket seemed meant only for me. I couldn’t go into business, I couldn’t make money, because I was a Bellegarde. I could n’t go into politics, because I was a Bellegarde — the Bellegardes don’t recognize the Bonapartes. I could n’t go into literature, because I was a dunce. I could n’t marry a rich girl, because no Bellegarde had ever married a roturière, and it was not proper that I should begin. We shall have to come to it, yet. Marriageable heiresses, de notre bord, are not to be had for nothing; it must be name for name, and fortune for fortune. The only thing I could do was to go and fight for the Pope. That I did, punctiliously, and received an apostolic flesh-wound at Castelfidardo. It did neither the Holy Father nor me any good, that I could see. Rome was doubtless a very amusing place in the days of Caligula, but it has sadly fallen off since.
I passed three years in the Castle of St. Angelo, and then came back to secular life.”
“ So you have no profession —you do nothing,” said Newman.
”1 do nothing! I am supposed to amuse myself, and, to tell the truth, I have amused myself. One can, if one knows how. But you can’t keep it up forever. I am good for another five years, perhaps, but I foresee that after that I shall lose my appetite. Then what shall I do? I think I shall turn monk. Seriously, I think I shall tie a rope round my waist and go into a monastery. It was an old custom, and the old customs were very good. People understood life quite as well as we do. They kept the pot boiling till it cracked, and then they put it on the shelf altogether. ”
“Are you very religious?” asked Newman, in a tone which gave the inquiry a grotesque effect.
M. de Bellegarde evidently appreciated the comical element in the question, but he looked at Newman a moment with extreme soberness. “ I am a very good Catholic. I respect the church. I adore the blessed Virgin, and I fear the devil. ”
“ Well, then,” said Newman, “ you are very well fixed. You have got pleasure in the present and religion in the future; what do you complain of? ”
“ It’s a part of one’s pleasure to complain. There is something in your own circumstances that irritates me. You are the first man I have ever envied. It’s singular, but so it is. I have known many men who, besides any factitious advantages that I may possess, had money and brains into the bargain; but somehow they have never disturbed my good-humor. But you have got something that I should have liked to have. It is not money, it is not even brains, — though no doubt yours are excellent. It is not your six feet of height, though I should have rather liked to be a couple of inches taller. It ’s a sort of air you have of being thoroughly at home in the world. When I was a boy, my father told me that it was by such an air as that that you recognized a Bellegarde. He called my attention to it. He did n’t advise me to cultivate it; he said that as we grew up it always came of itself. I supposed it had come to me, because I think I have always had the feeling. My place in life was made for me, and it seemed easy to occupy it. But you who, as I understand it, have made your own place, you who, as you told us the other day, have manufactured wash-tubs, — you strike me, somehow, as a man who stands at his ease, who looks at things from a height. I fancy you going about the world like a man traveling on a railroad in which he owns a large amount of stock. You make me feel as if 1 had missed something. What is it? ”
“ It is the proud consciousness of honest toil — of having manufactured a few wash-tubs,” said Newman, at once jocose and serious.
“ Oh, no; I have seen men who had done even more, men who had made not only wash-tubs, but soap — strong-smelling yellow soap, in great bars; and they never made me the least uncomfortable.”
“ Then it’s the privilege of being an American citizen,” said Newman; “that sets a man up.”
“ Possibly,” rejoined M. de Bellegarde. " But I am forced to say that I have seen a great many American citizens that did n’t seem at all set up or in the least like large stockholders. I never envied them. I rather think the thing is an accomplishment of your own.”
“ Oh, come,” said Newman, “you will make me proud! ”
“ No, I shall not. You have nothing to do with pride, or with humility,— that is a part of this easy manner of yours. People are proud only when they have something to lose, and humble when they have something to gain.”
“ I don’t know what I have to lose,” said Newman, “ but I certainly have something to gain.”
“ What is it? ” asked his visitor.
Newman hesitated a while. “ I will tell you when I know you better.”
“ I hope that will be soon! Then, if I can help you to gain it, I shall be happy.”
“ Perhaps you may,” said Newman.
“Don’t forget, then, that I am your servant,” M. de Bellegarde answered; and shortly afterwards he took his departure.
During the next three weeks Newman saw Bellegarde several times, and without formally swearing an eternal friendship the two men established a sort of comradeship. To Newman, Bellegarde was the ideal Frenchman, the Frenchman of tradition and romance, so far as our hero was acquainted with these mystical influences. Gallant, expansive, amusing, more pleased himself with the effect he produced than those (even when they were well pleased) for whom he produced it; a master of all the distinctively social virtues, and a votary of all agreeable sensations; a devotee of something mysterious and sacred, to which he occasionally alluded in terms more ecstatic even than those in which he spoke of the last pretty woman, and which was simply the beautiful though somewhat superannuated image of honor ; he was irresistibly entertaining and enlivening, and he formed a character to which Newman was as capable of doing justice when he had once been placed in contact with it, as he was unlikely, in musing upon the possible mixtures of our human ingredients, mentally to have foreshadowed it. Bellegarde did not in the least cause him to modify his needful premise that all Frenchmen are of a frothy and imponderable substance; he simply reminded him that light materials may be beaten up into a most agreeable compound. No two companions could be more different, but their differences made a capital basis for a friendship of which the distinctive characteristic was that it was extremely amusing to each.
Valentin de Bellegarde lived in the basement of an old house in the Rue d’Anjou St. Honoré, and his small apartments lay between the court of the house and an old garden which spread itself behind it, — one of those large, sunless, humid gardens into which you look unexpectingly in Paris from back windows, wondering how among the grudging habitations they find their space. When Newman returned Bellegarde’s visit, he hinted that his lodging was at least as much a laughing matter as his own. But its oddities were of a different cast from those of our hero’s gilded saloons on the Boulevard Haussmann: the place was low, dusky, contracted, and crowded with curious bric-à-brac. Bellegarde, penniless patrician as he was, was an insatiable collector, and his walls were covered with rusty arms and ancient panels and platters, his doorways draped in faded tapestries, his floors muffled in the skins of beasts. Here and there was one of those uncomfortable tributes to elegance in which the upholsterer’s art, in France, is so prolific, a curtained recess with a sheet of looking-glass in which, among the shadows, you could see nothing, and a divan on which, for its festoons and furbelows, you could not sit, or a fire-place draped, flounced, and frilled to the complete exclusion of fire. The young man’s possession were in picturesque disorder, and his apartment was pervaded by the odor of cigars, mingled with perfumes more inscrutable. Newman thought it a damp, gloomy place to live in, and was puzzled by the obstructive and fragmentary character of the furniture.
Bellegarde, according to the custom of his country, talked very generously about himself, and unveiled the mysteries of his private history with an unsparing hand. Inevitably, he had a vast deal to say about women, and he used frequently to indulge in sentimental and ironical apostrophes to these authors of his joys and woes. “ Oh, the women, the women, and the things they have made me do! ” he would exclaim with a lustrous eye. “ C’est égal, of all the follies and stupidities I have committed for them I would not have missed one! ” On this subject Newman maintained an habitual reserve; to expatiate largely upon it had always seemed to him a proceeding vaguely analogous to the cooing of pigeons and the chattering of monkeys, and even inconsistent with a fully developed human character. But Bellegarde’s confidences greatly amused him, and rarely displeased him, for the generous young Frenchman was not a cynic. “I really think,” he had once said, “ that I am not more depraved than most of my contemporaries. They are tolerably depraved, my contemporaries! ” He said wonderfully pretty things about his female friends, and, numerous and various as they had been, declared that on the whole there was more good in them than harm. “But you are not to take that as advice,” he added. “ As an authority I am very untrustworthy. I 'm prejudiced in their favor; I’m an idealist !” Newman listened to him with his impartial smile, and was glad, for his own sake, that he had fine feelings; but he mentally repudiated the idea of a Frenchman having discovered any merit in the amiable sex which he himself did not suspect. M. de Bellegarde, however, did not confine his conversation to the autobiographical channel; he questioned our hero largely as to the events of his own life, and Newman told him some better stories than any that Bellegarde carried in his budget. He narrated his career, in fact, from the beginning, through all its variations, and whenever his companion’s credulity, or his habits of gentility, appeared to protest, it amused him to heighten the color of the episode. Newman had sat with Western humorists in knots, round cast-iron stoves, and seen “ tall ” stories grow taller without toppling over, and his own imagination had learned the trick of piling up consistent wonders. Bellegarde’s regular attitude at last became that of laughing self-defense; to save his reputation as an all-knowing Frenchman, he doubted of everything, wholesale. The result of this was that Newman found it impossible to convince him of certain time-honored verities.
“But the details don’t matter,” said M. de Bellegarde. “ You have evidently had some surprising adventures; you have seen some strange sides of life, you have revolved to and fro over a whole continent as I walk up and down the Boulevard. You are a man of the world, with a vengeance! You have spent some deadly dull hours, and you have done some extremely disagreeable things: you have shoveled sand, as a boy, for supper, and you have eaten roast dog in a gold-diggers’ camp. You have stood casting up figures for ten hours at a time, and you have sat through Methodist sermons for the sake of looking at a pretty girl in another pew. All that is rather stiff, as we say. But at any rate you have done something and you are something; you have used your will and you have made your fortune. You have not stupefied yourself with debauchery and you have not mortgaged your fortune to social conveniences. You take things easily, and you have fewer prejudices even than I, who pretend to have none, but who in reality have three or four. Happy man, you are strong and you are free. But what the deuce,” demanded the young man in conclusion, " do you propose to do with such advantages ? Really to use them you need a better world than this. There is nothing worth your while here.”
“ Oh, I think there is something,” said Newman.
“ What is it? ”
“ Well,” said Newman, “ I will tell you some other time.”
In this way our hero delayed from day to day broaching a subject which he had very much at heart. Meanwhile, however, he was growing practically familiar with it; in other words, he had called again, three times, on Madame de Cintré. On only two of these occasion had he found her at home, and on each of them she had other visitors. They were numerous and extremely loquacious, and they exacted much of their hostess’s attention. She found time, however, to bestow a little of it on Newman, in an occasional vague smile, the very vagueness of which pleased him, allowing him as it did to fill it mentally, both at the time and afterward, with such meanings as most pleased him. He sat by without speaking, looking at the entrances and exits, the greetings and chatterings, of Madame de Cintré’s visitors. He felt as if he were at the play, and as if his own speaking would be an interruption; sometimes he wished he had a book, to follow the dialogue; he half expected to see a woman in a white cap and pink ribbons come and offer one to him for two francs. Some of the ladies looked at him very hard — or very soft, as you please; others seemed profoundly unconscious of his presence. The men looked only at Madame de Cintré. This was inevitable; for whether one called her beautiful or not, she entirely occupied and filled one’s vision, just as an agreeable sound fills one’s ear. Newman had but twenty distinct words with her, but he carried away an impression to which solemn promises could not have given a higher value. She was part of the play that he was seeing acted, quite as much as her companions; but how she filled the stage and how much better she did it! Whether she rose or seated herself; whether she went with her departing friends to the door and lifted up the heavy curtain as they passed out, and stood an instant looking after them and giving them the last nod; or whether she leaned back in her chair with her arms crossed and her eyes resting, listening and smiling; she gave Newman the feeling that he would like to have her always before him, moving slowly to and fro along the whole scale of expressive hospitality. If it might be to him, it would be well; if it might be for him, it would be still better! She was so tall and yet so light, so active and yet so still, so elegant and yet so simple, so frank and yet so mysterious! It was the mystery — it was what she was off the stage, as it were — that interested Newman most of all. He could not have told you what warrant he had for talking about mysteries; if it had been his habit to express himself in poetic figures, he might have said that in observing Madame de Cintré he seemed to see the vague circle which sometimes accompanies the partly-filled disk of the moon. It was not that she was reserved; on the contrary, she was as frank as flowing water. But he was sure she had qualities which she herself did not suspect.
He had abstained for several reasons from saying some of these things to Bellegarde. One reason was that before proceeding to any act he was always circumspect, conjectural, contemplative; he had little eagerness, as became a man who felt that whenever he really began to move he walked with long steps. And then, it simply pleased him not to speak — it occupied him, it excited him. But one day Bellegarde had been dining with him, at a restaurant, and they had sat long over their dinner. On rising from it, Bellegarde proposed that, to help them through the rest of the evening, they should go and see Madame Dandelard. Madame Dandelard was a little Italian lady who had married a Frenchman who proved to be a rake and a brute and the torment of her life. Her husband had spent all her money, and then, lacking the means of obtaining more expensive pleasures, had taken, in his duller hours, to beating her. She had a blue spot on her arm, which she showed to several persons, including Bellegarde. She had obtained a separation from her husband, collected the scraps of her fortune (they were very meagre), and come to live in Paris, where she was staying at a hôtel garni. She was always looking for an apartment, and visiting, tentatively, those of other people. She was very pretty, very child-like, and she made very extraordinary remarks. Bellegarde had made her acquaintance, and the source of his interest in her was, according to his own declaration, a curiosity as to what would become of her. “ She is poor, she is pretty, and she is silly,” he said; “ it seems to me she can go only one way. It’s a pity, but it can’t be helped. I will give her six months. She has nothing to fear from me, but I am watching the process. I am curious to see just how things will go. Yes, I know what you are going to say: this horrible Paris hardens one’s heart. But it quickens one’s wits, and it ends by teaching one a refinement of observation! To see this little woman’s little drama play itself out, now, is, for me, an intellectual pleasure.”
“If she is going to throw herself away,” Newman had said, “ you ought to stop her. ”
“ Stop her? How stop her? ”
“ Talk to her; give her some good advice. ”
Bellegarde laughed. “ Heaven deliver us both! Imagine the situation! Go and advise her yourself. ”
It was after this that Newman had gone with Bellegarde to see Madame Dandelard. When they came away, Bellegarde reproached his companion. “ Where was your famous advice? ” he asked. “ I did n’t hear a word of it.”
“ Oh, I give it up,” said Newman, simply.
“ Then you are as bad as I! ” said Bellegarde.
“ No, because I don’t take an ' intellectual pleasure ’ in her prospective adventures. I don’t in the least want to see her going down hill. I had rather look the other way. But why,” he asked, in a moment, “ don’t you get your sister to go and see her? ”
Bellegarde stared. “ Go and see Madame Dandelard — my sister? ”
“ She might talk to her to very good purpose.”
Bellegarde shook his head with sudden gravity. “ My sister can’t see that sort of person. Madame Dandelard is nothing at all; they would never meet.”
“ I should think,” said Newman, “ that your sister might see whom she pleased.” And he privately resolved that after he knew her a little better he would ask Madame de Cintré to go and talk to the foolish little Italian lady.
After his dinner with Bellegarde, on the occasion I have mentioned, he demurred to his companion’s proposal that they should go again and listen to Madame Dandelard describe her sorrows and her bruises. “I have something better in mind,” he said; “ come home with me and finish the evening before my fire.”
Bellegarde always welcomed the prospect of a long stretch of conversation, and before long the two men sat watching the great blaze which scattered its scintillations over the high adornments of Newman’s formidable saloon.
Henry James, Jr.