to M. de Bellegarde, who saw himself reflected in the mind of his potential brother-in-law in a crude and colorless form, unpleasantly dissimilar to the impressive image projected upon his own intellectual mirror.  He never forgot himself for an instant, and replied to what he must have considered Newman’s “advances” with mechanical politeness.  Newman, who was constantly forgetting himself, and indulging in an unlimited amount of irresponsible inquiry and conjecture, now and then found himself confronted by the conscious, ironical smile of his host.  What the deuce M. de Bellegarde was smiling at he was at a loss to divine.  M. de Bellegarde’s smile may be supposed to have been, for himself, a compromise between a great many emotions.  So long as he smiled he was polite, and it was proper he should be polite.  A smile, moreover, committed him to nothing more than politeness, and left the degree of politeness agreeably vague.  A smile, too, was neither dissent—­which was too serious—­nor agreement, which might have brought on terrible complications.  And then a smile covered his own personal dignity, which in this critical situation he was resolved to keep immaculate; it was quite enough that the glory of his house should pass into eclipse.  Between him and Newman, his whole manner seemed to declare there could be no interchange of opinion; he was holding his breath so as not to inhale the odor of democracy.  Newman was far from being versed in European politics, but he liked to have a general idea of what was going on about him, and he accordingly asked M. de Bellegarde several times what he thought of public affairs.  M. de Bellegarde answered with suave concision that he thought as ill of them as possible, that they were going from bad to worse, and that the age was rotten to its core.  This gave Newman, for the moment, an almost kindly feeling for the marquis; he pitied a man for whom the world was so cheerless a place, and the next time he saw M. de Bellegarde he attempted to call his attention to some of the brilliant features of the time.  The marquis presently replied that he had but a single political conviction, which was enough for him:  he believed in the divine right of Henry of Bourbon, Fifth of his name, to the throne of France.  Newman stared, and after this he ceased to talk politics with M. de Bellegarde.  He was not horrified nor scandalized, he was not even amused; he felt as he should have felt if he had discovered in M. de Bellegarde a taste for certain oddities of diet; an appetite, for instance, for fishbones or nutshells.  Under these circumstances, of course, he would never have broached dietary questions with him.