However, he was sought after for more solid qualities than these:  for the nobleness of his sentiments, his pleasant disposition, and the certainty of his connections.  Those who knew him intimately quickly learned to esteem his sound judgment, his keen sense of honour, and to discover under his cold exterior a warm heart, an excessive sensibility, and a delicacy almost feminine.  In a word, although he might be eclipsed in a room full of strangers or simpletons, he charmed all hearts in a smaller circle, where he felt warmed by an atmosphere of sympathy.

He accustomed himself to go about a great deal.  He reasoned, wisely perhaps, that a magistrate can make better use of his time than by remaining shut up in his study, in company with books of law.  He thought that a man called upon to judge others, ought to know them, and for that purpose study them.  An attentive and discreet observer, he examined the play of human interests and passions, exercised himself in disentangling and manoeuvring at need the strings of the puppets he saw moving around him.  Piece by piece, so to say, he laboured to comprehend the working of the complicated machine called society, of which he was charged to overlook the movements, regulate the springs, and keep the wheels in order.

And on a sudden, in the early part of the winter of 1860 and 1861, M. Daburon disappeared.  His friends sought for him, but he was nowhere to be met with.  What could he be doing?  Inquiry resulted in the discovery that he passed nearly all his evenings at the house of the Marchioness d’Arlange.  The surprise was as great as it was natural.

This dear marchioness was, or rather is,—­for she is still in the land of the living,—­a personage whom one would consider rather out of date.  She is surely the most singular legacy bequeathed us by the eighteenth century.  How, and by what marvellous process she had been preserved such as we see her, it is impossible to say.  Listening to her, you would swear that she was yesterday at one of those parties given by the queen where cards and high stakes were the rule, much to the annoyance of Louis XIV., and where the great ladies cheated openly in emulation of each other.

Manners, language, habits, almost costume, she has preserved everything belonging to that period about which authors have written only to display the defects.  Her appearance alone will tell more than an exhaustive article, and an hour’s conversation with her, more than a volume.

She was born in a little principality, where her parents had taken refuge whilst awaiting the chastisements and repentance of an erring and rebellious people.  She had been brought up amongst the old nobles of the emigration, in some very ancient and very gilded apartment, just as though she had been in a cabinet of curiosities.  Her mind had awakened amid the hum of antediluvian conversations, her imagination had first been aroused by arguments a little less profitable than those of an assembly of deaf persons convoked to decide upon the merits of the work of some distinguished musician.  Here she imbibed a fund of ideas, which, applied to the forms of society of to-day, are as grotesque as would be those of a child shut up until twenty years of age in an Assyrian museum.