Two days after, Mariette placed the following letter in Mademoiselle de Watteville’s hand:—­

  Albert Savaron to Leopold Hannequin.

“Yes, ’tis so, my dear friend; I am at Besancon, while you thought I was traveling.  I would not tell you anything till success should begin, and now it is dawning.  Yes, my dear Leopold, after so many abortive undertakings, over which I have shed the best of my blood, have wasted so many efforts, spent so much courage, I have made up my mind to do as you have done—­to start on a beaten path, on the highroad, as the longest but the safest.  I can see you jump with surprise in your lawyer’s chair!

“But do not suppose that anything is changed in my personal life, of which you alone in the world know the secret, and that under the reservations she insists on.  I did not tell you, my friend; but I was horribly weary of Paris.  The outcome of the first enterprise, on which I had founded all my hopes, and which came to a bad end in consequence of the utter rascality of my two partners, who combined to cheat and fleece me—­me, though everything was done by my energy—­made me give up the pursuit of a fortune after the loss of three years of my life.  One of these years was spent in the law courts, and perhaps I should have come worse out of the scrape if I had not been made to study law when I was twenty.

“I made up my mind to go into politics solely, to the end that I may some day find my name on a list for promotion to the Senate under the title of Comte Albert Savaron de Savarus, and so revive in France a good name now extinct in Belgium—­though indeed I am neither legitimate nor legitimized.”

“Ah!  I knew it!  He is of noble birth!” exclaimed Rosalie, dropping the letter.

“You know how conscientiously I studied, how faithful and useful I was as an obscure journalist, and how excellent a secretary to the statesman who, on his part, was true to me in 1829.  Flung to the depths once more by the revolution of July just when my name was becoming known, at the very moment when, as Master of Appeals, I was about to find my place as a necessary wheel in the political machine, I committed the blunder of remaining faithful to the fallen, and fighting for them, without them.  Oh! why was I but three-and-thirty, and why did I not apply to you to make me eligible?  I concealed from you all my devotedness and my dangers.  What would you have?  I was full of faith.  We should not have agreed.

“Ten months ago, when you saw me so gay and contented, writing my political articles, I was in despair; I foresaw my fate, at the age of thirty-seven, with two thousand francs for my whole fortune, without the smallest fame, just having failed in a noble undertaking, the founding, namely, of a daily paper answering only to a need of the future instead of appealing to the passions of the moment.