ction
to render it unnecessary for him to have recourse either to the poetry
of the Abbe Chaulieu, his harpsichord, or his chalks. Indeed, until
now, he had been only half engaged in the hazardous enterprise of which
the Duchesse de Maine and the Prince de Cellamare had shown him the
happy ending, and of which the captain, in order to try his courage, had
so brutally exhibited to him the bloody catastrophe. As yet he had only
been the end of a chain, and, on breaking away from one side, he would
have been loose. Now he was become an intermediate ring, fastened at
both ends, and attached at the same time to people above and below him
in society. In a word, from this hour he no longer belonged to himself,
and he was like the Alpine traveler, who, having lost his way, stops in
the middle of an unknown road, and measures with his eye, for the first
time, the mountain which rises above him and the gulf which yawns
beneath his feet.

Luckily the chevalier had the calm, cold, and resolute courage of a man
in whom fire and determination--those two opposite forces--instead of
neutralizing, stimulated each other. He engaged in danger with all the
rapidity of a sanguine man; he weighed it with all the consideration of
a phlegmatic one. Madame de Maine was right when she said to Madame de
Launay that she might put out her lantern, and that she believed she had
at last found a man.

But this man was young, twenty-six years of age, with a heart open to
all the illusions and all the poetry of that first part of existence. As
a child he had laid down his playthings at the feet of his mother. As a
young man he had come to exhibit his handsome uniform as colonel to the
eyes of his mistress; indeed, in every enterprise of his life some loved
image had gone before him, and he threw himself into danger with the
certainty that, if he succumbed, there would be some one surviving who
would mourn his fate.

But his mother was dead, the last woman by whom he had believed himself
loved had betrayed him, and he felt alone in the world--bound solely by
interest to men to whom he would become an obstacle as soon as he ceased
to be an instrument, and who, if he broke down, far from mourning his
loss, would only see in it a cause of satisfaction. But this isolated
position, which ought to be the envy of all men in a great danger, is
almost always (such is the egotism of our nature) a cause of the most
profound discouragement. Such is the horror of