irresponsible inquiry and conjecture, now and then found himself
confronted by the conscious, ironical smile of his host. What the
deuce M. de Bellegarde was smiling at he was at a loss to divine. M.
de Bellegarde's smile may be supposed to have been, for himself, a
compromise between a great many emotions. So long as he smiled he
was polite, and it was proper he should be polite. A smile, moreover,
committed him to nothing more than politeness, and left the degree of
politeness agreeably vague. A smile, too, was neither dissent--which
was too serious--nor agreement, which might have brought on terrible
complications. And then a smile covered his own personal dignity, which
in this critical situation he was resolved to keep immaculate; it was
quite enough that the glory of his house should pass into eclipse.
Between him and Newman, his whole manner seemed to declare there could
be no interchange of opinion; he was holding his breath so as not
to inhale the odor of democracy. Newman was far from being versed in
European politics, but he liked to have a general idea of what was going
on about him, and he accordingly asked M. de Bellegarde several times
what he thought of public affairs. M. de Bellegarde answered with suave
concision that he thought as ill of them as possible, that they were
going from bad to worse, and that the age was rotten to its core. This
gave Newman, for the moment, an almost kindly feeling for the marquis;
he pitied a man for whom the world was so cheerless a place, and the
next time he saw M. de Bellegarde he attempted to call his attention
to some of the brilliant features of the time. The marquis presently
replied that he had but a single political conviction, which was enough
for him: he believed in the divine right of Henry of Bourbon, Fifth
of his name, to the throne of France. Newman stared, and after this he
ceased to talk politics with M. de Bellegarde. He was not horrified nor
scandalized, he was not even amused; he felt as he should have felt if
he had discovered in M. de Bellegarde a taste for certain oddities of
diet; an appetite, for instance, for fishbones or nutshells. Under these
circumstances, of course, he would never have broached dietary questions
with him.

One afternoon, on his calling on Madame de Cintre, Newman was requested
by the servant to wait a few moments, as his hostess was not at liberty.
He walked about the room a while, taking up her books, smelling her
flowers,