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 if 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 moustache 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 person who in emptying 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 mouths.
“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 didn’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, “Everyone 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
anyone 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 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 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 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 its
other members, and that if a day ever came to try it, they should 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,” observed 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?” said 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 couldn’t go into
politics, because I was a Bellegarde—the Bellegardes don’t recognize
the Bonapartes. I couldn’t go into literature, because I was a dunce. I
couldn’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 Castlefidardo.
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.
“I 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. 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 people recognized a Bellegarde.
He called my attention to it. He didn’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 I 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 who didn’t seem at all set up
or in the least like large stock-holders. 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
concerned 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 curtain
recess with a sheet of looking-glass in which, among the shadows, you
could see nothing; a divan on which, for its festoons and furbelows,
you could not sit; a fireplace draped, flounced, and frilled to the
complete exclusion of fire. The young man’s possessions 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 maintain 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
walked 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 stupified 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,” murmured 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 occasions had he
found her at home, and on each of them she had other visitors. Her
visitors 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 out
mentally, both at the time and afterwards, 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 him one 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 should 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 somewhere, 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,
inquiringly, those of other people. She was very pretty, very
childlike, 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 didn’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
ball-room.