hat'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 se