, as bad and as ruined as mine, and he wished to see
no one. A wolf, a wild boar in his lair! Can you understand this
friendship between two old fellows, one of whom tried in every way to
direct his thoughts from himself, and the other, waiting death in a
corner of his fireside, solitary, unsociable?"

"Perfectly! Go on!"

And the magistrate, with eyes riveted upon Jacques Dantin, saw this man,
excited, making light of this recital of the past; evoking remembrances
of forgotten events, of this lost affection; lost, as all his life was.

"This is not a conference; is it not so? You no longer believe that it
is a comedy? I loved Rovere. Life had often separated us. He searched
for fortune at the other end of the world. I made a mess of mine and ate
it in Paris. But we always kept up our relations, and when he returned
to France we were happy in again seeing each other. The grayer turned
the hair, the more tender the heart became. I had always found him
morose--from his twentieth year he always dragged after him a sinister
companion--ennui. He had chosen a Consular career, to live far away, and
in a fashion not at all like ours. I have often laughingly said to him
that he probably had met with unrequited love; that he had experienced
some unhappy passion. He said, no! I feigned to believe it. One is not
sombre and melancholy like that without some secret grief. After all,
there are others who do not feel any gayer with a smile on the lips.
Sadness is no sign. Neither is gayety!"

His face took on a weary, melancholy expression, which at first
astonished the Magistrate; then he experienced a feeling of pity; he
listened, silent and grave.

"I will pass over all the details of our life, shall I not? My monologue
would be too long. The years of youth passed with a rapidity truly
astonishing; we come to the time when we found ourselves--he weary of
life, established in his chosen apartments in the Boulevard de Clichy,
with his paintings and books; sitting in front of his fire and awaiting
death--I continuing to spur myself on like a foundered horse. Rovere
moralized to me; I jeered at his sermons, and I went to sit by his
fireside and talk over the past. One of his joys had been this portrait
of me, painted by Paul Baudry. He had hung it up in his salon, at the
corner of the chimney piece, at the left, and he often said to me:

"'Dost thou know that when thou art not here I talk to it?'

"I was not there very often. Par