o 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 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-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