too handsome, like
some of our friends that look rather too much of professional beauties
to be anything else; but no more of that; we have said it, it is
shocking! Well, he was a crack shot, and sat a horse to admiration; he
had fought a duel for a trifle, and had not killed his man.

"If you wish to know in what pure, complete, and unadulterated happiness
consists in this Nineteenth Century in Paris--the happiness, that is to
say, of a young man of twenty-six--do you realize that you must enter
into the infinitely small details of existence? Beaudenord's bootmaker
had precisely hit off his style of foot; he was well shod; his tailor
loved to clothe him. Godefroid neither rolled his r's, nor lapsed into
Normanisms nor Gascon; he spoke pure and correct French, and tied his
cravat correctly (like Finot). He had neither father nor mother--such
luck had he!--and his guardian was the Marquis d'Aiglemont, his cousin
by marriage. He could go among city people as he chose, and the Faubourg
Saint-Germain could make no objection; for, fortunately, a young
bachelor is allowed to make his own pleasure his sole rule of life, he
is at liberty to betake himself wherever amusement is to be found, and
to shun the gloomy places where cares flourish and multiply. Finally, he
had been vaccinated (you know what I mean, Blondet).

"And yet, in spite of all these virtues," continued Bixiou, "he
might very well have been a very unhappy young man. Eh! eh! that word
happiness, unhappily, seems to us to mean something absolute, a delusion
which sets so many wiseacres inquiring what happiness is. A very clever
woman said that 'Happiness was where you chose to put it.'"

"She formulated a dismal truth," said Blondet.

"And a moral," added Finot.

"Double distilled," said Blondet. "Happiness, like Good, like Evil, is
relative. Wherefore La Fontaine used to hope that in the course of time
the damned would feel as much at home in hell as a fish in water."

"La Fontaine's sayings are known in Philistia!" put in Bixiou.

"Happiness at six-and-twenty in Paris is not the happiness of
six-and-twenty at--say Blois," continued Blondet, taking no notice of
the interruption. "And those that proceed from this text to rail at
the instability of opinion are either knaves or fools for their pains.
Modern medicine, which passed (it is its fairest title to glory) from a
hypothetical to a positive science, through the influence of the great
analytical school