shman on the road to his embassy.

From these general signs you will readily discern a family man,
harassed by vexations in his own household, worried by annoyances at the
ministry, yet philosopher enough to take life as he found it; an honest
man, loving his country and serving it, not concealing from himself the
obstacles in the way of those who seek to do right; prudent, because he
knew men; exquisitely courteous with women, of whom he asked nothing,--a
man full of acquirements, affable with his inferiors, holding his equals
at great distance, and dignified towards his superiors. At the epoch of
which we write, you would have noticed in him the coldly resigned air of
one who has buried the illusions of his youth and renounced every secret
ambition; you would have recognized a discouraged, but not disgusted
man, one who still clings to his first projects,--more perhaps to
employ his faculties than in the hope of a doubtful success. He was not
decorated with any order, and always accused himself of weakness
for having worn that of the Fleur-de-lis in the early days of the
Restoration.

The life of this man was marked by certain mysterious peculiarities.
He had never known his father; his mother, a woman to whom luxury was
everything, always elegantly dressed, always on pleasure bent, whose
beauty seemed to him miraculous and whom he very seldom saw, left
him little at her death; but she had given him that too common and
incomplete education which produces so much ambition and so little
ability. A few days before his mother's death, when he was just sixteen,
he left the Lycee Napoleon to enter as supernumerary a government
office, where an unknown protector had provided him with a place.
At twenty-two years of age Rabourdin became under-head-clerk; at
twenty-five, head-clerk, or, as it was termed, head of the bureau. From
that day the hand that assisted the young man to start in life was never
felt again in his career, except as to a single circumstance; it led
him, poor and friendless, to the house of a Monsieur Leprince, formerly
an auctioneer, a widower said to be extremely rich, and father of
an only daughter. Xavier Rabourdin fell desperately in love with
Mademoiselle Celestine Leprince, then seventeen years of age, who had
all the matrimonial claims of a dowry of two hundred thousand francs.
Carefully educated by an artistic mother, who transmitted her own
talents to her daughter, this young lady was fitted to at