t man, whose name had been uttered by Gozlan; and, when the
moment came for settling, marked her appreciation of what she had
heard and seen by charging him nothing for the macaroni. Balzac, not
to be outdone in generosity, made her a gift of his copy of Cooper,
expressing his regret that he had not one of his own novels with him
that he might have offered her instead.

No account of this macaroni feast figures in his almost daily letters
at this time despatched to Madame Hanska. To her, if he mentioned his
diet, its meagreness was emphasized rather. Being in one of his
chronic hard-up crises, he excused himself for the intervals that had
occurred between some of his previous epistles on the ground of having
no ready money for the postage--the rates for Russia, it is true, were
high; and he spoke of buying a bit of dry bread on the boulevards, or
of intending to beg from Rothschild; then flourished his big debt at
the end, quoting fantastic sums, variable as the barometer, which
would oblige him sooner or later, notwithstanding his constant
devotion to the Countess, whom he loved more than he loved God, to
barter himself away to some agreeable young woman who should be
willing to bestow her person upon him, plus a couple of hundred
thousand francs. Once or twice there was really a question of his
making a match through the good offices of his mother, of whom he none
the less said fretfully that she did not think much about him. But, on
each occasion, the negotiations fell through--why we do not learn.
Such information, maybe, he reserved for the various dames in Paris
whose houses he still frequented. Madame de Girardin had managed to
get him back; and some sort of relations had been re-established
between him and her husband, mostly business, since Monsieur de
Girardin continued to be editor of the _Presse_.

One day, Gozlan met him in the Champs Elysees, just as he had left
Delphine's _salon_. He looked chilly and anxious. The chill he
attributed to the unheated drawing-room that he had quitted; but it
was due mostly to his condition of mind, then much exercised by
something of prime importance to him, the finding of a name for a
story which he had written but could not christen, in spite of
protracted meditation. It was a man's name he wanted--a name unusual,
striking, suggestive of the extraordinary nature of the person he had
created. "Why not try the names you see in the street?" said Gozlan
incautiously. "The v