by Henry James
CHAPTER VII
One evening very late, about a week after his visit to Madame deCintré, Newman’s servant brought him a card. It was that of young M. deBellegarde. When, a few moments later, he went to receive his visitor,he found him standing in the middle of his great gilded parlor and eyingit from cornice to carpet. M. de Bellegarde’s face, it seemed toNewman, expressed a sense of lively entertainment. “What the devil ishe laughing at now?” our hero asked himself. But he put the questionwithout acrimony, for he felt that Madame de Cintré’s brother was a goodfellow, and he had a presentiment that on this basis of good fellowshipthey were destined to understand each other. Only, if there was anythingto laugh at, he wished to have a glimpse of it too.
“To begin with,” said the young man, as he extended his hand, “have Icome 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 ofmy room?”
“It is not size only,” replied M. de Bellegarde, “but splendor, andharmony, and beauty of detail. It was the smile of admiration.”
Newman looked at him a moment, and then, “So it _is_ very ugly?” heinquired.
“Ugly, my dear sir? It is magnificent.”
“That is the same thing, I suppose,” said Newman. “Make yourselfcomfortable. 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 liketo see my visitors cheerful. Only, I must make this request: that youexplain the joke to me as soon as you can speak. I don’t want to loseanything, myself.”
M. de Bellegarde stared, with a look of unresentful perplexity. He laidhis hand on Newman’s sleeve and seemed on the point of saying something,but he suddenly checked himself, leaned back in his chair, and puffedat his cigar. At last, however, breaking silence,--“Certainly,” he said,“my coming to see you is an act of friendship. Nevertheless I was in ameasure obliged to do so. My sister asked me to come, and a request frommy sister is, for me, a law. I was near you, and I observed lightsin what I supposed were your rooms. It was not a ceremonious hour formaking a call, but I was not sorry to do something that would show I wasnot 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 meunlimited leave to laugh. Certainly I am a great laugher, and it isbetter to laugh too much than too little. But it is not in order that wemay laugh together--or separately--that I have, I may say, sought youracquaintance. To speak with almost impudent frankness, you interest me!” All this was uttered by M. de Bellegarde with the modulated smoothnessof the man of the world, and in spite of his excellent English, ofthe Frenchman; but Newman, at the same time that he sat noting itsharmonious flow, perceived that it was not mere mechanical urbanity.Decidedly, there was something in his visitor that he liked. M. deBellegarde was a foreigner to his finger-tips, and if Newman had met himon 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 whichseemed to cast a sort of aerial bridge over the impassable gulf producedby difference of race. He was below the middle height, and robust andagile in figure. Valentin de Bellegarde, Newman afterwards learned, hada mortal dread of the robustness overtaking the agility; he was afraidof growing stout; he was too short, as he said, to afford a belly. Herode and fenced and practiced gymnastics with unremitting zeal, and ifyou greeted him with a “How well you are looking” he started and turnedpale. In your _well_ he read a grosser monosyllable. He had a roundhead, high above the ears, a crop of hair at once dense and silky, abroad, low forehead, a short nose, of the ironical and inquiring ratherthan of the dogmatic or sensitive cast, and a moustache as delicate asthat of a page in a romance. He resembled his sister not in feature,but in the expression of his clear, bright eye, completely void ofintrospection, and in the way he smiled. The great point in his facewas that it was intensely alive--frankly, ardently, gallantly alive. Thelook of it was like a bell, of which the handle might have been in theyoung man’s soul: at a touch of the handle it rang with a loud, silversound. There was something in his quick, light brown eye which assuredyou that he was not economizing his consciousness. He was not livingin a corner of it to spare the furniture of the rest. He was squarelyencamped in the centre and he was keeping open house. When he smiled, itwas like the movement of a person who in emptying a cup turns it upsidedown: he gave you the last drop of his jollity. He inspired Newman withsomething of the same kindness that our hero used to feel in his earlieryears for those of his companions who could perform strange and clevertricks--make their joints crack in queer places or whistle at the backof their mouths.
“My sister told me,” M. de Bellegarde continued, “that I ought to comeand remove the impression that I had taken such great pains to produceupon you; the impression that I am a lunatic. Did it strike you that Ibehaved very oddly the other day?”
“Rather so,” said Newman.
“So my sister tells me.” And M. de Bellegarde watched his host for amoment through his smoke-wreaths. “If that is the case, I think we hadbetter let it stand. I didn’t try to make you think I was a lunatic, atall; on the contrary, I wanted to produce a favorable impression.But if, after all, I made a fool of myself, it was the intention ofProvidence. I should injure myself by protesting too much, for Ishould seem to set up a claim for wisdom which, in the sequel of ouracquaintance, I could by no means justify. Set me down as a lunatic withintervals 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 Bellegardeanswered. “But I didn’t come here to talk about myself. I should like toask 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 askingquestions, not answering them. You have come to Paris for yourpleasure?”
Newman was silent a while. Then, at last, “Everyone asks me that!” hesaid 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 istrue.”
“And you are enjoying it?”
Like any other good American, Newman thought it as well not to truckleto the foreigner. “Oh, so-so,” he answered.
M. de Bellegarde puffed his cigar again in silence. “For myself,” hesaid at last, “I am entirely at your service. Anything I can do for youI shall be very happy to do. Call upon me at your convenience. Is thereanyone you desire to know--anything you wish to see? It is a pity youshould not enjoy Paris.”
“Oh, I do enjoy it!” said Newman, good-naturedly. “I’m much obliged toyou.”
“Honestly speaking,” M. de Bellegarde went on, “there is somethingabsurd to me in hearing myself make you these offers. They representa great deal of goodwill, but they represent little else. You are asuccessful man and I am a failure, and it’s a turning of the tables totalk 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 anedifice, you are a financial, commercial power, you can travel aboutthe world until you have found a soft spot, and lie down in it withthe consciousness of having earned your rest. Is not that true? Well,imagine the exact reverse of all that, and you have me. I have donenothing--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. “Hangit, no man is rich!”
“I have heard philosophers affirm,” laughed M. de Bellegarde, “thatno man was poor; but your formula strikes me as an improvement. As ageneral thing, I confess, I don’t like successful people, and I findclever men who have made great fortunes very offensive. They tread onmy toes; they make me uncomfortable. But as soon as I saw you, I saidto myself. ‘Ah, there is a man with whom I shall get on. He hasthe good-nature of success and none of the _morgue_; he has not ourconfoundedly 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 onwhich we think or feel alike. But I rather think we shall get on, forthere 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 havehad two or three delicious quarrels in my day!” and M. de Bellegarde’shandsome smile assumed, at the memory of these incidents, an almostvoluptuous intensity.
With the preamble embodied in his share of the foregoing fragment ofdialogue, he paid our hero a long visit; as the two men sat with theirheels on Newman’s glowing hearth, they heard the small hours of themorning striking larger from a far-off belfry. Valentin de Bellegardewas, by his own confession, at all times a great chatterer, and on thisoccasion he was evidently in a particularly loquacious mood. It was atradition of his race that people of its blood always conferred a favorby their smiles, and as his enthusiasms were as rare as his civility wasconstant, he had a double reason for not suspecting that his friendshipcould ever be importunate. Moreover, the flower of an ancient stem ashe was, tradition (since I have used the word) had in his temperamentnothing of disagreeable rigidity. It was muffled in sociability andurbanity, as an old dowager in her laces and strings of pearls. Valentinwas what is called in France a _gentilhomme_, of the purest source, andhis 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 comfortablya young man of ordinary good parts. But all that he was he was byinstinct and not by theory, and the amiability of his character was sogreat that certain of the aristocratic virtues, which in some aspectsseem rather brittle and trenchant, acquired in his application of theman extreme geniality. In his younger years he had been suspected of lowtastes, and his mother had greatly feared he would make a slip in themud of the highway and bespatter the family shield. He had been treated,therefore, to more than his share of schooling and drilling, but hisinstructors had not succeeded in mounting him upon stilts. They couldnot spoil his safe spontaneity, and he remained the least cautious andthe most lucky of young nobles. He had been tied with so short a rope inhis 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 handsthan in those of some of its other members, and that if a day ever cameto try it, they should see. His talk was an odd mixture of almost boyishgarrulity and of the reserve and discretion of the man of the world,and he seemed to Newman, as afterwards young members of the Latin racesoften seemed to him, now amusingly juvenile and now appallingly mature.In America, Newman reflected, lads of twenty-five and thirty have oldheads and young hearts, or at least young morals; here they have youngheads and very aged hearts, morals the most grizzled and wrinkled.
“What I envy you is your liberty,” observed M. de Bellegarde, “your widerange, your freedom to come and go, your not having a lot of people, whotake 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 tohinder 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 wasimpossible you should remain what you were born, and being born poor--doI understand it?--it was therefore inevitable that you should becomerich. You were in a position that makes one’s mouth water; you lookedround you and saw a world full of things you had only to step up to andtake hold of. When I was twenty, I looked around me and saw a world witheverything ticketed ‘Hands off!’ and the deuce of it was that the ticketseemed meant only for me. I couldn’t go into business, I couldn’t makemoney, because I was a Bellegarde. I couldn’t go into politics, becauseI was a Bellegarde--the Bellegardes don’t recognize the Bonapartes. Icouldn’t go into literature, because I was a dunce. I couldn’t marry arich girl, because no Bellegarde had ever married a _roturière_, and itwas 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 Icould do was to go and fight for the Pope. That I did, punctiliously,and received an apostolic flesh-wound at Castlefidardo. It did neitherthe Holy Father nor me any good, that I could see. Rome was doubtless avery amusing place in the days of Caligula, but it has sadly fallen offsince. I passed three years in the Castle of St. Angelo, and then cameback 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, Ihave amused myself. One can, if one knows how. But you can’t keep it upforever. I am good for another five years, perhaps, but I foresee thatafter that I shall lose my appetite. Then what shall I do? I think Ishall turn monk. Seriously, I think I shall tie a rope round my waistand go into a monastery. It was an old custom, and the old customs werevery good. People understood life quite as well as we do. They keptthe pot boiling till it cracked, and then they put it on the shelfaltogether.”
“Are you very religious?” asked Newman, in a tone which gave the inquirya grotesque effect.
M. de Bellegarde evidently appreciated the comical element in thequestion, but he looked at Newman a moment with extreme soberness. “I ama 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 gotpleasure in the present and religion in the future; what do you complainof?”
“It’s a part of one’s pleasure to complain. There is something in yourown circumstances that irritates me. You are the first man I have everenvied. It’s singular, but so it is. I have known many men who, besidesany factitious advantages that I may possess, had money and brains intothe bargain; but somehow they have never disturbed my good-humor. Butyou have got something that I should have liked to have. It is notmoney, it is not even brains--though no doubt yours are excellent. It isnot your six feet of height, though I should have rather liked to be acouple of inches taller. It’s a sort of air you have of being thoroughlyat home in the world. When I was a boy, my father told me that it wasby such an air as that that people recognized a Bellegarde. He called myattention to it. He didn’t advise me to cultivate it; he said that as wegrew up it always came of itself. I supposed it had come to me, becauseI 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, havemanufactured wash-tubs--you strike me, somehow, as a man who stands athis ease, who looks
at things from a height. I fancy you going about theworld like a man traveling on a railroad in which he owns a large amountof 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 afew wash-tubs,” said Newman, at once jocose and serious.
“Oh no; I have seen men who had done even more, men who had made notonly 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 Ihave seen a great many American citizens who didn’t seem at all set upor in the least like large stock-holders. I never envied them. I ratherthink 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 withhumility--that is a part of this easy manner of yours. People areproud only when they have something to lose, and humble when they havesomething to gain.”
“I don’t know what I have to lose,” said Newman, “but I certainly havesomething 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 shallbe 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, andwithout formally swearing an eternal friendship the two men establisheda sort of comradeship. To Newman, Bellegarde was the ideal Frenchman,the Frenchman of tradition and romance, so far as our hero was concernedwith these mystical influences. Gallant, expansive, amusing, morepleased himself with the effect he produced than those (even whenthey were well pleased) for whom he produced it; a master of all thedistinctively social virtues and a votary of all agreeable sensations;a devotee of something mysterious and sacred to which he occasionallyalluded in terms more ecstatic even than those in which he spoke of thelast pretty woman, and which was simply the beautiful though somewhatsuperannuated image of _honor_; he was irresistibly entertaining andenlivening, and he formed a character to which Newman was as capable ofdoing justice when he had once been placed in contact with it, as he wasunlikely, in musing upon the possible mixtures of our human ingredients,mentally to have foreshadowed it. Bellegarde did not in the least causehim to modify his needful premise that all Frenchmen are of a frothy andimponderable substance; he simply reminded him that light materials maybe beaten up into a most agreeable compound. No two companions couldbe more different, but their differences made a capital basis for afriendship of which the distinctive characteristic was that it wasextremely amusing to each.
Valentin de Bellegarde lived in the basement of an old house in the Rued’Anjou St. Honoré, and his small apartments lay between the court ofthe house and an old garden which spread itself behind it--one of thoselarge, sunless humid gardens into which you look unexpectingly in Parisfrom back windows, wondering how among the grudging habitations theyfind their space. When Newman returned Bellegarde’s visit, he hintedthat _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’sgilded saloons on the Boulevard Haussmann: the place was low, dusky,contracted, and crowded with curious bric-à-brac. Bellegarde, pennilesspatrician as he was, was an insatiable collector, and his walls werecovered with rusty arms and ancient panels and platters, his doorwaysdraped in faded tapestries, his floors muffled in the skins of beasts.Here and there was one of those uncomfortable tributes to elegance inwhich the upholsterer’s art, in France, is so prolific; a curtain recesswith a sheet of looking-glass in which, among the shadows, you could seenothing; a divan on which, for its festoons and furbelows, you could notsit; a fireplace draped, flounced, and frilled to the complete exclusionof fire. The young man’s possessions were in picturesque disorder, andhis apartment was pervaded by the odor of cigars, mingled with perfumesmore inscrutable. Newman thought it a damp, gloomy place to live in,and was puzzled by the obstructive and fragmentary character of thefurniture.
Bellegarde, according to the custom of his country talked verygenerously about himself, and unveiled the mysteries of his privatehistory with an unsparing hand. Inevitably, he had a vast deal tosay about women, and he used frequently to indulge in sentimental andironical apostrophes to these authors of his joys and woes. “Oh, thewomen, the women, and the things they have made me do!” he would exclaimwith a lustrous eye. “_C’est égal_, of all the follies and stupiditiesI have committed for them I would not have missed one!” On this subjectNewman maintained an habitual reserve; to expatiate largely upon it hadalways seemed to him a proceeding vaguely analogous to the cooing ofpigeons and the chattering of monkeys, and even inconsistent with afully developed human character. But Bellegarde’s confidences greatlyamused him, and rarely displeased him, for the generous young Frenchmanwas not a cynic. “I really think,” he had once said, “that I am not moredepraved than most of my contemporaries. They are tolerably depraved,my contemporaries!” He said wonderfully pretty things about his femalefriends, and, numerous and various as they had been, declared that onthe whole there was more good in them than harm. “But you are notto take that as advice,” he added. “As an authority I am veryuntrustworthy. I’m prejudiced in their favor; I’m an _idealist!_” Newmanlistened to him with his impartial smile, and was glad, for his ownsake, that he had fine feelings; but he mentally repudiated the ideaof a Frenchman having discovered any merit in the amiable sex which hehimself did not suspect. M. de Bellegarde, however, did not confine hisconversation to the autobiographical channel; he questioned our herolargely as to the events of his own life, and Newman told him somebetter stories than any that Bellegarde carried in his budget. Henarrated his career, in fact, from the beginning, through all itsvariations, and whenever his companion’s credulity, or his habits ofgentility, appeared to protest, it amused him to heighten the colorof the episode. Newman had sat with Western humorists in knots, roundcast-iron stoves, and seen “tall” stories grow taller without topplingover, and his own imagination had learned the trick of piling upconsistent wonders. Bellegarde’s regular attitude at last became thatof laughing self-defense; to maintain his reputation as an all-knowingFrenchman, he doubted of everything, wholesale. The result of this wasthat Newman found it impossible to convince him of certain time-honoredverities.
“But the details don’t matter,” said M. de Bellegarde. “You haveevidently had some surprising adventures; you have seen some strangesides of life, you have revolved to and fro over a whole continent asI walked up and down the Boulevard. You are a man of the world with avengeance! You have spent some deadly dull hours, and you have done someextremely disagreeable things: you have shoveled sand, as a boy, forsupper, and you have eaten roast dog in a gold-diggers’ camp. You havestood casting up figures for ten hours at a time, and you have satthrough Methodist sermons for the sake of looking at a pretty girl inanother pew. All that is rather stiff, as we say. But at any rate youhave done something and you are something; you have used your willand you have made your fortune. You have not stupified yourselfwith debauchery and you have not mortgaged your fortune to socialconveniences. You take things easily, and you have fewer prejudices eventhan I, who pretend to have none, but who in reality have three orfour. 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 suchadvantages? Really to use them you need a better world than this. Thereis nothing worth your while here.”
“Oh, I think there is something,” said Newman.
“What is it?”
“Well,” murmured Newman, “I will tell you some othe
r time!”
In this way our hero delayed from day to day broaching a subjectwhich he had very much at heart. Meanwhile, however, he was growingpractically familiar with it; in other words, he had called again, threetimes, on Madame de Cintré. On only two of these occasions had he foundher at home, and on each of them she had other visitors. Her visitorswere numerous and extremely loquacious, and they exacted much of theirhostess’s attention. She found time, however, to bestow a little of iton Newman, in an occasional vague smile, the very vagueness of whichpleased him, allowing him as it did to fill it out mentally, both at thetime and afterwards, with such meanings as most pleased him. He sat bywithout speaking, looking at the entrances and exits, the greetings andchatterings, of Madame de Cintré’s visitors. He felt as if he were atthe play, and as if his own speaking would be an interruption sometimeshe wished he had a book, to follow the dialogue; he half expected to seea woman in a white cap and pink ribbons come and offer him one for twofrancs. Some of the ladies looked at him very hard--or very soft, as youplease; others seemed profoundly unconscious of his presence. The menlooked only at Madame de Cintré. This was inevitable; for whether onecalled her beautiful or not, she entirely occupied and filled one’svision, just as an agreeable sound fills one’s ear. Newman had buttwenty distinct words with her, but he carried away an impression towhich solemn promises could not have given a higher value. She was partof 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 sherose or seated herself; whether she went with her departing friends tothe door and lifted up the heavy curtain as they passed out, and stoodan instant looking after them and giving them the last nod; or whethershe leaned back in her chair with her arms crossed and her eyes resting,listening and smiling; she gave Newman the feeling that he should liketo have her always before him, moving slowly to and fro along the wholescale of expressive hospitality. If it might be _to_ him, it would bewell; if it might be _for_ him, it would be still better! She was sotall and yet so light, so active and yet so still, so elegant and yet sosimple, so frank and yet so mysterious! It was the mystery--it was whatshe was off the stage, as it were--that interested Newman most ofall. He could not have told you what warrant he had for talking aboutmysteries; if it had been his habit to express himself in poetic figureshe might have said that in observing Madame de Cintré he seemed to seethe vague circle which sometimes accompanies the partly-filled disk ofthe moon. It was not that she was reserved; on the contrary, she wasas frank as flowing water. But he was sure she had qualities which sheherself did not suspect.
He had abstained for several reasons from saying some of these thingsto Bellegarde. One reason was that before proceeding to any act he wasalways circumspect, conjectural, contemplative; he had little eagerness,as became a man who felt that whenever he really began to move hewalked with long steps. And then, it simply pleased him not to speak--itoccupied him, it excited him. But one day Bellegarde had been diningwith him, at a restaurant, and they had sat long over their dinner. Onrising from it, Bellegarde proposed that, to help them through therest of the evening, they should go and see Madame Dandelard. MadameDandelard was a little Italian lady who had married a Frenchman whoproved to be a rake and a brute and the torment of her life. Her husbandhad spent all her money, and then, lacking the means of obtaining moreexpensive 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 tolive in Paris, where she was staying at a _hôtel garni_. She was alwayslooking for an apartment, and visiting, inquiringly, those of otherpeople. She was very pretty, very childlike, and she made veryextraordinary remarks. Bellegarde had made her acquaintance, and thesource of his interest in her was, according to his own declaration, acuriosity 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 hasnothing to fear from me, but I am watching the process. I am curious tosee just how things will go. Yes, I know what you are going to say: thishorrible Paris hardens one’s heart. But it quickens one’s wits, and itends by teaching one a refinement of observation! To see this littlewoman’s little drama play itself out, now, is, for me, an intellectualpleasure.”
“If she is going to throw herself away,” Newman had said, “you ought tostop her.”
“Stop her? How stop her?”
“Talk to her; give her some good advice.”
Bellegarde laughed. “Heaven deliver us both! Imagine the situation! Goand advise her yourself.”
It was after this that Newman had gone with Bellegarde to see MadameDandelard. 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 prospectiveadventures. I don’t in the least want to see her going down hill. I hadrather look the other way. But why,” he asked, in a moment, “don’t youget 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 thatsort of person. Madame Dandelard is nothing at all; they would nevermeet.”
“I should think,” said Newman, “that your sister might see whom shepleased.” And he privately resolved that after he knew her a littlebetter he would ask Madame de Cintré to go and talk to the foolishlittle 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 andlisten to Madame Dandelard describe her sorrows and her bruises.
“I have something better in mind,” he said; “come home with me andfinish the evening before my fire.”
Bellegarde always welcomed the prospect of a long stretch ofconversation, and before long the two men sat watching the great blazewhich scattered its scintillations over the high adornments of Newman’sball-room.
