ewdness of mind and a broad expanse
of the qualities of the brain do not exclude either the strength or
the grandeur of sentiments. He is, by rare privilege, equally a man of
action and a man of thought. His private life is noble and generous. If
he carefully avoided love, it was because he knew himself, and felt a
premonition of the empire such a passion would exercise upon him.

For several years the crushing toil by which he prepared the solid
ground of his subsequent works, and the chill of poverty, were
marvellous preservatives. But when ease with his inherited fortune came
to him, he formed a vulgar and most incomprehensible connection with a
rather handsome woman, belonging to the lower classes, without education
or manners, whom he carefully concealed from every eye. Michel Chrestien
attributed to men of genius the power of transforming the most
massive creatures into sylphs, fools into clever women, peasants into
countesses; the more accomplished a woman was, the more she lost her
value in their eyes, for, according to Michel, their imagination had the
less to do. In his opinion love, a mere matter of the senses to inferior
beings, was to great souls the most immense of all moral creations
and the most binding. To justify d'Arthez, he instanced the example of
Raffaele and the Fornarina. He might have offered himself as an
instance for this theory, he who had seen an angel in the Duchesse
de Maufrigneuse. This strange fancy of d'Arthez might, however, be
explained in other ways; perhaps he had despaired of meeting here below
with a woman who answered to that delightful vision which all men of
intellect dream of and cherish; perhaps his heart was too sensitive, too
delicate, to yield itself to a woman of society; perhaps he thought best
to let nature have her way, and keep his illusions by cultivating his
ideal; perhaps he had laid aside love as being incompatible with his
work and the regularity of a monastic life which love would have wholly
upset.

For several months past d'Arthez had been subjected to the jests and
satire of Blondet and Rastignac, who reproached him with knowing neither
the world nor women. According to them, his authorship was sufficiently
advanced, and his works numerous enough, to allow him a few
distractions; he had a fine fortune, and here he was living like a
student; he enjoyed nothing,--neither his money nor his fame; he was
ignorant of the exquisite enjoyments of the noble and delic