the face changes from sentiment to sentimentality, and the artifices of the mind show their rusty edges.  Genius alone renews its skin like a snake; and in the matter of charm, as in everything else, it is only the heart that never grows old.  People who have hearts are simple in all their ways.  Now Canalis, as we know, had a shrivelled heart.  He misused the beauty of his glance by giving it, without adequate reason, the fixity that comes to the eyes in meditation.  In short, applause was to him a business, in which he was perpetually on the lookout for gain.  His style of paying compliments, charming to superficial people, seemed insulting to others of more delicacy, by its triteness and the cool assurance of its cut-and-dried flattery.  As a matter of fact, Melchior lied like a courtier.  He remarked without blushing to the Duc de Chaulieu, who made no impression whatever when he was obliged to address the Chamber as minister of foreign affairs, “Your excellency was truly sublime!” Many men like Canalis are purged of their affectations by the administration of non-success in little doses.

These defects, slight in the gilded salons of the faubourg Saint-Germain, where every one contributes his or her quota of absurdity, and where these particular forms of exaggerated speech and affected diction—­magniloquence, if you please to call it so —­are surrounded by excessive luxury and sumptuous toilettes, which are to some extent their excuse, were certain to be far more noticed in the provinces, whose own absurdities are of a totally different type.  Canalis, by nature over-strained and artificial, could not change his form; in fact, he had had time to grow stiff in the mould into which the duchess had poured him; moreover, he was thoroughly Parisian, or, if you prefer it, truly French.  The Parisian is amazed that everything everywhere is not as it in Paris; the Frenchman, as it is in France.  Good taste, on the contrary, demands that we adapt ourselves to the customs of foreigners without losing too much of our own character,—­as did Alcibiades, that model of a gentleman.  True grace is elastic; it lends itself to circumstances; it is in harmony with all social centres; it wears a robe of simple material in the streets, noticeable only by its cut, in preference to the feathers and flounces of middle-class vulgarity.  Now Canalis, instigated by a woman who loved herself much more than she loved him, wished to lay down the law and be, everywhere, such as he himself might see fit to be.  He believed he carried his own public with him wherever he went,—­an error shared by several of the great men of Paris.

While the poet made a studied and effective entrance into the salon of the Chalet, La Briere slipped in behind him like a person of no account.

“Ha! do I see my soldier?” said Canalis, perceiving Dumay, after addressing a compliment to Madame Mignon, and bowing to the other women.  “Your anxieties are relieved, are they not?” he said, offering his hand effusively; “I comprehend them to their fullest extent after seeing mademoiselle.  I spoke to you of terrestrial creatures, not of angels.”