by the title which his altered state
had conferred upon him.

His natural disposition was as trustful and unsuspicious as it was
artless and ingenuous; and from his early youth all the lessons which
had been taught him by his parents tended to preserve in him
unblemished and unbroken that bright gem, which once shattered never
can be restored, confidence in the truth, the probity, the goodness of
mankind.

Some ruder schooling he had met in the course of his service in the
eastern world--he had already learned that men, and--harder knowledge
yet to gain--women also, can feign friendship, ay, and love, where
neither have the least root in the heart, for purposes the vilest,
ends the most sordid. He had learned that bosom friends can be secret
foes; that false loves can betray; and yet he was not disenchanted
with humanity, he had not even dreamed of doubting, because he had
fallen among worldly-minded flatterers and fickle-hearted coquettes,
that absolute friendship and unchangeable love may exist, even in
this evil world, stainless and incorruptible among all the changes and
chances of this mortal life.

If he had been deceived, he had attributed the failure of his hopes
hitherto to the right cause--the fallacy of his own judgment, and the
error of his own choice; and the more he had been disappointed, the
more firmly had he relied on what he felt certain could not change,
the affection of his parents, the love of his betrothed bride.

On the very instant of his landing he found himself shipwrecked in his
first hope; and on his earliest interview with his uncle, in Paris, he
had the agony--the utter and appalling agony to undergo--of hearing
that in the only promise which he had flattered himself was yet left
to him, he was destined in all probability to undergo a deeper,
deadlier disappointment.

If Melanie d'Argenson had been a lovely girl, the good abbe said, when
she was budding out of childhood into youth, so utterly had she
outstripped all the promise of her girlhood, that no words could
describe, no imagination suggest to itself the charms of the mature
yet youthful woman. There was no other beauty named, when loveliness
was the theme, throughout all France, than that of the young betrothed
of Raoul de Douarnez. And that which was so loudly and so widely
bruited abroad, could not fail to reach the ever open, ever greedy
ears of the vile and sensual tyrant who sat on the throne of France at
that time, heapi