“That’s another thing that it sounds foolish to say,” said Newman.  “Hang it, no man is rich!”

“I have heard philosophers affirm,” laughed M. de Bellegarde, “that no man was poor; but your formula strikes me as an improvement.  As a general thing, I confess, I don’t like successful people, and I find clever men who have made great fortunes very offensive.  They tread on my toes; they make me uncomfortable.  But as soon as I saw you, I said to myself.  ’Ah, there is a man with whom I shall get on.  He has the good-nature of success and none of the morgue; he has not our confoundedly irritable French vanity.’  In short, I took a fancy to you.  We are very different, I’m sure; I don’t believe there is a subject on which we think or feel alike.  But I rather think we shall get on, for there is such a thing, you know, as being too different to quarrel.”

“Oh, I never quarrel,” said Newman.

“Never!  Sometimes it’s a duty—­or at least it’s a pleasure.  Oh, I have had two or three delicious quarrels in my day!” and M. de Bellegarde’s handsome smile assumed, at the memory of these incidents, an almost voluptuous intensity.

With the preamble embodied in his share of the foregoing fragment of dialogue, he paid our hero a long visit; as the two men sat with their heels on Newman’s glowing hearth, they heard the small hours of the morning striking larger from a far-off belfry.  Valentin de Bellegarde was, by his own confession, at all times a great chatterer, and on this occasion he was evidently in a particularly loquacious mood.  It was a tradition of his race that people of its blood always conferred a favor by their smiles, and as his enthusiasms were as rare as his civility was constant, he had a double reason for not suspecting that his friendship could ever be importunate.  Moreover, the flower of an ancient stem as he was, tradition (since I have used the word) had in his temperament nothing of disagreeable rigidity.  It was muffled in sociability and urbanity, as an old dowager in her laces and strings of pearls.  Valentin was what is called in France a gentilhomme, of the purest source, and his rule of life, so far as it was definite, was to play the part of a gentilhomme.  This, it seemed to him, was enough to occupy comfortably a young man of ordinary good parts.  But all that he was he was by instinct and not by theory, and the amiability of his character was so great that certain of the aristocratic virtues, which in some aspects seem rather brittle and trenchant, acquired in his application of them an extreme geniality.  In his younger years he had been suspected of low tastes, and his mother had greatly feared he would make a slip in the mud of the highway and bespatter the family shield.  He had been treated, therefore, to more than his share of schooling and drilling, but his instructors had not succeeded in mounting him upon stilts.  They could not spoil his safe spontaneity, and he remained the least cautious and the most lucky of