one could promptly see the priest.  He seemed to take a great satisfaction in Valentin’s interview with the cure, and yet his conversation did not at all indicate a sanctimonious habit of mind.  M. Ledoux had evidently a high sense of the becoming, and was prepared to be urbane and tasteful on all points.  He was always furnished with a smile (which pushed his mustache up under his nose) and an explanation.  Savoir-vivre—­knowing how to live—­was his specialty, in which he included knowing how to die; but, as Newman reflected, with a good deal of dumb irritation, he seemed disposed to delegate to others the application of his learning on this latter point.  M. de Grosjoyaux was of quite another complexion, and appeared to regard his friend’s theological unction as the sign of an inaccessibly superior mind.  He was evidently doing his utmost, with a kind of jovial tenderness, to make life agreeable to Valentin to the last, and help him as little as possible to miss the Boulevard des Italiens; but what chiefly occupied his mind was the mystery of a bungling brewer’s son making so neat a shot.  He himself could snuff a candle, etc., and yet he confessed that he could not have done better than this.  He hastened to add that on the present occasion he would have made a point of not doing so well.  It was not an occasion for that sort of murderous work, que diable!  He would have picked out some quiet fleshy spot and just tapped it with a harmless ball.  M. Stanislas Kapp had been deplorably heavy-handed; but really, when the world had come to that pass that one granted a meeting to a brewer’s son!...  This was M. de Grosjoyaux’s nearest approach to a generalization.  He kept looking through the window, over the shoulder of M. Ledoux, at a slender tree which stood at the end of a lane, opposite to the inn, and seemed to be measuring its distance from his extended arm and secretly wishing that, since the subject had been introduced, propriety did not forbid a little speculative pistol-practice.

Newman was in no humor to enjoy good company.  He could neither eat nor talk; his soul was sore with grief and anger, and the weight of his double sorrow was intolerable.  He sat with his eyes fixed upon his plate, counting the minutes, wishing at one moment that Valentin would see him and leave him free to go in quest of Madame de Cintre and his lost happiness, and mentally calling himself a vile brute the next, for the impatient egotism of the wish.  He was very poor company, himself, and even his acute preoccupation and his general lack of the habit of pondering the impression he produced did not prevent him from reflecting that his companions must be puzzled to see how poor Bellegarde came to take such a fancy to this taciturn Yankee that he must needs have him at his death-bed.  After breakfast he strolled forth alone into the village and looked at the fountain, the geese, the open barn doors, the brown, bent old women, showing their hugely