he joined the revolutionary armies when his relatives fled
from France, and slowly won his steps to his present rank. A certain
_hauteur_ in his manner with men--an air of distance he always wore--had
made him as little liked by them as it usually succeeds in making a man
popular with women, to whom the opposite seems at once a compliment.
He was a man who had seen much of the world, and in the best society;
gifted with the most fascinating address, whenever he pleased to exert
it, and singularly good-looking, he was the _beau ideal_ of the French
officer of the highest class.

The Chevalier Duchesne and myself had travelled together for some
days without exchanging more than the ordinary civilities of distant
acquaintance, when some accident of the road threw us more closely
together, and ended by forming an intimacy which, in our Paris life,
brought us every hour into each other's society.

Stranger as I was in the capital, to me the acquaintance was a boon of
great price. He knew it thoroughly: in the gorgeous and stately _salons_
of the Faubourg; in the _guingettes_ of the Rue St. Denis; in the costly
mansion of the modern banker (the new aristocracy of the land); or in
the homely _menage_ of the shopkeeper of the Rue St. Honore,--he was
equally at home, and by some strange charm had the _entree_ too.

The same "sesame" opened to him the _coulisse_ of the Opera and the
penetralia of the Francais. In fact, he seemed one of those privileged
people who are met with occasionally in life in places the most
incongruous and with acquaintances the most opposite, yet never carrying
the prestige of the one or the other an inch beyond the precincts it
belongs to. Had he been wealthy I could have accounted for much of this,
for never was there a period when riches more abounded nor when their
power was more absolute: but he did not seem so; although in no want of
money, his retinue and simple style of living betrayed nothing beyond
fair competence. Neither, as far as I could perceive, did he incline to
habits of extravagance; on the contrary, he was too apt to connect every
display with vulgarity, and condemn in his fastidiousness the gorgeous
splendor that characterized the period.

Such, without going further, did Duchesne appear to be, as we took up
our quarters at the Luxembourg, and commenced an intimacy which each day
served to increase.

"Well, thank Heaven, this vaudeville is over at last!" said he, as he
threw hi