Pity I regard as an insult to my pride: the comforter humiliates the
inconsolable mourner; besides, there are sorrows that all pretend to
understand, but which none really appreciate. It is useless, then, to
enumerate one's maladies to a would-be physician; and the world is
filled with those who delight in the miseries of others; who follow the
sittings of courts and luxuriate in heart-rending pictures of man's
injustice to his fellow.

I do not care to serve as a relaxation to this class of mankind, who,
since the abolition of the circus and amphitheatre, are compelled to
pick up their pleasure wherever they can find it; seeking the best
places to witness the struggle of Christian fortitude with adversity.

But every civilized age has its savage manners, and, knowing this, I
resemble in public the favorite of fortune. I simulate content, and my
face is radiant with deceit.

The idle and curious of the Boulevard Italien, the benches of the circus
would hardly recognise me as the gladiator struggling with an
iron-clawed monster--they are all deceived.

I feel a repugnance, dear Edgar, to entertaining you with a recital of
my mysterious sorrow. I would prefer to leave you in ignorance, or let
you divine them, but I explain to prevent your friendship imagining
afflictions that are not mine.

In the first place, to reassure you, my fortune has not suffered during
my absence. On my return to Paris, my agent dazzled me with the picture
of my wealth.

"Happy man!" said he; "a great name, a large fortune, health that has
defied the fires of the tropics, the ice of the poles,--and only
thirty!" The notary reasoned well from a notary's stand-point. If I were
to reduce my possessions to ingots, they would certainly balance a
notary's estimate of happiness; therefore, fear nothing for my fortune.

Nor must you imagine that I grieve over my political and military
prospects that were lost in the royal storm of '30, when plebeian cannon
riddled the Tuilleries and shattered a senile crown. I was only sixteen,
and hardly understood the lamentations of my father, whose daily refrain
was, "My child, your future is destroyed."

A man's future lies in any honorable career. If I have left the
epaulettes of my ancestors reposing in their domestic shrine, I can
bequeath to my children other decorations.

I have just returned from a ten years' campaign against all nations,
bringing back a marvellous quantity of trophies, but without