tion; he always
attended the earliest mass at Saint-Paul's for pious workmen and
servants. Not one of his friends, no one at Court, knew that he so
punctually fulfilled the practice of religion. He was addicted to God as
some men are addicted to a vice, with the greatest mystery. Thus one day
I came to find the Count at the summit of an Alp of woe much higher than
that on which many are who think themselves the most tried; who laugh at
the passions and the beliefs of others because they have conquered their
own; who play variations in every key of irony and disdain. He did not
mock at those who still follow hope into the swamps whither she leads,
nor those who climb a peak to be alone, nor those who persist in the
fight, reddening the arena with their blood and strewing it with their
illusions. He looked on the world as a whole; he mastered its beliefs;
he listened to its complaining; he was doubtful of affection, and yet
more of self-sacrifice; but this great and stern judge pitied them,
or admired them, not with transient enthusiasm, but with silence,
concentration, and the communion of a deeply-touched soul. He was a sort
of catholic Manfred, and unstained by crime, carrying his choiceness
into his faith, melting the snows by the fires of a sealed volcano,
holding converse with a star seen by himself alone!

"I detected many dark riddles in his ordinary life. He evaded my gaze
not like a traveler who, following a path, disappears from time to time
in dells or ravines according to the formation of the soil, but like a
sharpshooter who is being watched, who wants to hide himself, and seeks
a cover. I could not account for his frequent absences at the times when
he was working the hardest, and of which he made no secret from me, for
he would say, 'Go on with this for me,' and trust me with the work in
hand.

"This man, wrapped in the threefold duties of the statesman, the judge,
and the orator, charmed me by a taste for flowers, which shows an
elegant mind, and which is shared by almost all persons of refinement.
His garden and his study were full of the rarest plants, but he always
bought them half-withered. Perhaps it pleased him to see such an image
of his own fate! He was faded like these dying flowers, whose almost
decaying fragrance mounted strangely to his brain. The Count loved his
country; he devoted himself to public interests with the frenzy of a
heart that seeks to cheat some other passion; but the studies