“Ah!” said the notary’s wife, examining Canalis, who was swinging his body like a man who knows he is being looked at.  The fault lay with the great lady who flattered him incessantly and spoiled him,—­as all women older than their adorers invariably spoil and flatter them; Canalis in his moral being was a sort of Narcissus.  When a woman of a certain age wishes to attach a man forever, she begins by deifying his defects, so as to cut off all possibility of rivalry; for a rival is never, at the first approach, aware of the super-fine flattery to which the man is accustomed.  Coxcombs are the product of this feminine manoeuvre, when they are not fops by nature.  Canalis, taken young by the handsome duchess, vindicated his affectations to his own mind by telling himself that they pleased that “grande dame,” whose taste was law.  Such shades of character may be excessively faint, but it is improper for the historian not to point them out.  For instance, Melchior possessed a talent for reading which was greatly admired, and much injudicious praise had given him a habit of exaggeration, which neither poets nor actors are willing to check, and which made people say of him (always through De Marsay) that he no longer declaimed, he bellowed his verses; lengthening the sounds that he might listen to himself.  In the slang of the green-room, Canalis “dragged the time.”  He was fond of exchanging glances with his hearers, throwing himself into postures of self-complacency and practising those tricks of demeanor which actors call “balancoires,”—­the picturesque phrase of an artistic people.  Canalis had his imitators, and was in fact the head of a school of his kind.  This habit of declamatory chanting slightly affected his conversation, as we have seen in his interview with Dumay.  The moment the mind becomes finical the manners follow suit, and the great poet ended by studying his demeanor, inventing attitudes, looking furtively at himself in mirrors, and suiting his discourse to the particular pose which he happened to have taken up.  He was so preoccupied with the effect he wished to produce, that a practical joke, Blondet, had bet once or twice, and won the wager, that he could nonplus him at any moment by merely looking fixedly at his hair, or his boots, or the tails of his coats.

These airs and graces, which started in life with a passport of flowery youth, now seemed all the more stale and old because Melchior himself was waning.  Life in the world of fashion is quite as exhausting to men as it is to women, and perhaps the twenty years by which the duchess exceeded her lover’s age, weighed more heavily upon him than upon her; for to the eyes of the world she was always handsome,—­without rouge, without wrinkles, and without heart.  Alas! neither men nor women have friends who are friendly enough to warn them of the moment when the fragrance of their modesty grows stale, when the caressing glance is but an echo of the stage, when the expression of