nsolation in one another's company. Even this very evening he was in
dread of a collapse of that threatening arch which debt erects over the
head of many a Parisian. He had allowed his anxieties to appear upon his
face; he had refused to play cards at Madame d'Espard's; he had talked
with the women in an absent-minded manner, and finally he had sunk down
silent and absorbed in the arm-chair from which he had just risen like
Banquo's ghost.

Comte Maxime de Trailles now found himself the object of all glances,
direct and indirect, standing as he did before the fireplace and
illumined by the cross-lights of two candelabra. The few words said
about him compelled him, in a way, to bear himself proudly; and he did
so, like a man of sense, without arrogance, and yet with the intention
of showing himself to be above suspicion. A painter could scarcely have
found a better moment in which to seize the portrait of a man who, in
his way, was truly extraordinary. Does it not require rare faculties to
play such a part,--to enable one through thirty years to seduce
women; to constrain one to employ great gifts in an underhand sphere
only,--inciting a people to rebel, tracking the secrets of austere
politicians, and triumphing nowhere but in boudoirs and on the
back-stairs of cabinets?

Is there not something, difficult to say what, of greatness in being
able to rise to the highest calculations of statesmen and then to fall
coldly back into the void of a frivolous life? Where is the man of iron
who can withstand the alternating luck of gambling, the rapid missions
of diplomacy, the warfare of fashion and society, the dissipations of
gallantry,--the man who makes his memory a library of lies and craft,
who envelops such diverse thoughts, such conflicting manoeuvres, in one
impenetrable cloak of perfect manners? If the wind of favor had blown
steadily upon those sails forever set, if the luck of circumstances had
attended Maxime, he could have been Mazarin, the Marechal de Richelieu,
Potemkin, or--perhaps more truly--Lauzun, without Pignerol.

The count, though rather tall and constitutionally slender, had of late
acquired some protuberance of stomach, but he "restrained it to the
majestic," as Brillat-Savarin once said. His clothes were always so well
made, that he kept about his whole person an air of youth, something
active and agile, due no doubt to his habits of exercise,--fencing,
riding, and hunting. Maxime possessed all the ph