No voice had ever vibrated to her ear like this voice, whose grave sonorousness stirred within her strange sensations, and legions of thoughts which she had never suspected.  She was surprised at the accent of simplicity with which he spoke of the illustriousness of his family, of his past opulence, of his obscure labors, and of his exalted hopes.

She admired the superb disregard for money which beamed forth in his every word.  Here was then one man, at least, who despised that money before which she had hitherto seen all the people she knew prostrated in abject worship.

After a pause of a few moments, Marius de Tregars, still addressing himself apparently to his aged companion, went on: 

“I repeat it, because it is the truth, my old friend, this life of labor and privation, so new to me, was not a burden.  Calm, silence, the constant exercise of all the faculties of the intellect, have charms which the vulgar can never suspect.  I was happy to think, that, if I was ruined, it was through an act of my own will.  I found a positive pleasure in the fact that I, the Marquis de Tregars, who had had a hundred thousand a year—­I must the next moment go out in person to the baker’s and the green-grocer’s to purchase my supplies for the day.  I was proud to think that it was to my labor alone, to the work for which I was paid by Marcolet, that I owed the means of prosecuting my task.  And, from the summits where I was carried on the wings of science, I took pity on your modern existence, on that ridiculous and tragical medley of passions, interests, and cravings; that struggle without truce or mercy, whose law is, woe to the weak, in which whosoever falls is trampled under feet.

“Sometimes, however, like a fire that has been smouldering under the ashes, the flame of youthful passions blazed up within me.  I had hours of madness, of discouragement, of distress, during which solitude was loathsome to me.  But I had the faith which raises mountains—­faith in myself and my work.  And soon, tranquilized, I would go to sleep in the purple of hope, beholding in the vista of the distant future the triumphal arches erected to my success.

“Such was my situation, when, one afternoon in the month of February last, after an experiment upon which I had founded great hopes, and which had just miserably failed, I came here to breathe a little fresh air.

“It was a beautiful spring day, warm and sunny.  The sparrows were chirping on the branches, swelled with sap:  bands of children were running along the alleys, filling the air with their joyous screams.

“I was sitting upon a bench, ruminating over the causes of my failure, when two ladies passed by me; one somewhat aged, the other quite young.  They were walking so rapidly, that I hardly had time to see them.

“But the young lady’s step, the noble simplicity of her carriage, had struck me so much, that I rose to follow her with the intention of passing her, and then walking back to have a good view of her face.  I did so; and I was fairly dazzled.  At the moment when my eyes met hers, a voice rose within me, crying that it was all over now, and that my destiny was fixed.”