第35章

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 obligated 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 goodwill, 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 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 Isaw 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 geniality.

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 it's other members, and that if a day ever came to try it, they should see.