his person. He
endeavored to shock neither man nor woman. Indulgent to defects both
physical and mental, he listened patiently (by the help of the
Princess Goritza) to the many dull people who related to him the petty
miseries of provincial life,--an egg ill-boiled for breakfast, coffee
with feathered cream, burlesque details about health, disturbed sleep,
dreams, visits. The chevalier could call up a languishing look, he
could take on a classic attitude to feign compassion, which made him a
most valuable listener; he could put in an "Ah!" and a "Bah!" and a
"What DID you do?" with charming appropriateness. He died without any
one suspecting him of even an allusion to the tender passages of his
romance with the Princess Goritza. Has any one ever reflected on the
service a dead sentiment can do to society; how love may become both
social and useful? This will serve to explain why, in spite of his
constant winning at play (he never left a salon without carrying off
with him about six francs), the old chevalier remained the spoilt
darling of the town. His losses--which, by the bye, he always
proclaimed, were very rare.

All who know him declare that they have never met, not even in the
Egyptian museum at Turin, so agreeable a mummy. In no country in the
world did parasitism ever take on so pleasant a form. Never did
selfishness of a most concentrated kind appear less forth-putting,
less offensive, than in this old gentleman; it stood him in place of
devoted friendship. If some one asked Monsieur de Valois to do him a
little service which might have discommoded him, that some one did not
part from the worthy chevalier without being truly enchanted with him,
and quite convinced that he either could not do the service demanded,
or that he should injure the affair if he meddled in it.

To explain the problematic existence of the chevalier, the historian,
whom Truth, that cruel wanton, grasps by the throat, is compelled to
say that after the "glorious" sad days of July, Alencon discovered
that the chevalier's nightly winnings amounted to about one hundred
and fifty francs every three months; and that the clever old nobleman
had had the pluck to send to himself his annuity in order not to
appear in the eyes of a community, which loves the main chance, to be
entirely without resources. Many of his friends (he was by that time
dead, you will please remark) have contested mordicus this curious
fact, declaring it to be a fable, an