第37章

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.Honore, 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 HISlodging 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-a-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 egal, 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.