The Author of Beltraffio

, 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

fellow, and he had a presentiment that on this basis of good fellowship they were destined to und

ung man, as he extended his

or what?" a

a cigar

early to do that," said

are a str

ars," Newman ad

smoke here," said

atter? Is the

s like smoking in a ba

hing at just now?" Newman a

arde, "but splendor, and harmony, and beaut

ment, and then, "So it is

r sir? It is

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 v

gar. 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

rge as life," said New

st 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

the impression that I had taken such great pains to produce upon you; the impressi

so," sai

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 b

now what you are a

garde answered. "But I didn't come here to talk about mysel

specimen,"

e here a

With whom s

smile "I am asking questions, not answering t

Everyone asks me that!" he said with his mi

rate you h

e!" said Newman. "Though i

are enj

hought it as well not to truckle to th

our service. Anything I can do for you I shall be very happy to do. Call upon me at your convenience.

Newman, good-naturedly.

you these offers. They represent a great deal of goodwill, but they represent little else. You are a su

e you a failure

e 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 i

y n

I'm right, eh? You are a success? You have made a fortune

ounds foolish to say," said New

ffensive. 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 Frenc

r quarrel,"

o or three delicious quarrels in my day!" and M. de Bellegarde's handsome sm

trings 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 sp

o come and go, your not having a lot of people, who take themselves awfully seriously, expecti

what is to hinder you

that remark! Everything is to hinder

enny when I be

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

ofession-you do no

aps, 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

d Newman, in a tone which gave

but he looked at Newman a moment with extreme soberness. "I am a very good C

ixed. You have got pleasure in the present and

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 alwa

oil-of having manufactured a few wash-tubs

de not only wash-tubs, but soap-strong-smelling yellow soap, i

ing an American citizen," said

many American citizens who didn't seem at all set up or in the least like large stock-

Newman, "you wi

at is a part of this easy manner of yours. People are proud only when th

ose," said Newman, "but I cert

t?" asked

le. "I will tell you w

Then, if I can help you to

ou may," s

vant," M. de Bellegarde answered; and s

ocial 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

fferent 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 cur

leased 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

d 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 hav

ere is somethin

t is

wman, "I will tell

lf 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

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 h?tel 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

erself away," Newman had sa

r? How s

give her som

ver us both! Imagine the situati

Dandelard. When they came away, Bellegarde reproached his companion.

t up," said N

as bad as I!"

I don't in the least want to see her going down hill. I had rather look the other

"Go and see Madame

to her to very

y sister can't see that sort of person. Madame Da

d." And he privately resolved that after he knew her a little better he wo

he demurred to his companion's proposal that they should go again

he said; "come home with me and f

on, and before long the two men sat watching the great blaze which scat