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 of Paris, has proved beyond a doubt that a man is periodically renewed throughout——­”

“New haft, new blade, like Jeannot’s knife, and yet you think that he is still the same man,” broke in Bixiou.  “So there are several lozenges in the harlequin’s coat that we call happiness; and—­well, there was neither hole nor stain in this Godefroid’s costume.  A young man of six-and-twenty, who would be happy in love, who would be loved, that is to say, not for his blossoming youth, nor for his wit, nor for his figure, but spontaneously, and not even merely in return for his own love; a young man, I say, who has found love in the abstract, to quote Royer-Collard, might yet very possibly find never a farthing in the purse which She, loving and beloved, embroidered for him; he might owe rent to his landlord; he might be unable to pay the bootmaker before mentioned; his very tailor, like France herself, might at last show signs of disaffection.  In short, he might have love and yet be poor.  And poverty spoils a young man’s happiness, unless he holds our transcendental views of the fusion of interests.  I know nothing more wearing than happiness within combined with adversity without.  It is as if you had one leg freezing in the draught from the door, and the other half-roasted by a brazier—­as I have at this moment.  I hope to be understood.  Comes there an echo from thy waistcoat-pocket, Blondet?  Between ourselves, let the heart alone, it spoils the intellect.