visit, he hinted that his lodging was at least as much a laughing matter as his own.  But its oddities were of a different cast from those of our hero’s gilded saloons on the Boulevard Haussmann:  the place was low, dusky, contracted, and crowded with curious bric-a-brac.  Bellegarde, penniless patrician as he was, was an insatiable collector, and his walls were covered with rusty arms and ancient panels and platters, his doorways draped in faded tapestries, his floors muffled in the skins of beasts.  Here and there was one of those uncomfortable tributes to elegance in which the upholsterer’s art, in France, is so prolific; a curtain recess with a sheet of looking-glass in which, among the shadows, you could see nothing; a divan on which, for its festoons and furbelows, you could not sit; a fireplace draped, flounced, and frilled to the complete exclusion of fire.  The young man’s possessions were in picturesque disorder, and his apartment was pervaded by the odor of cigars, mingled with perfumes more inscrutable.  Newman thought it a damp, gloomy place to live in, and was puzzled by the obstructive and fragmentary character of the furniture.

Bellegarde, according to the custom of his country talked very generously about himself, and unveiled the mysteries of his private history with an unsparing hand.  Inevitably, he had a vast deal to say about women, and he used frequently to indulge in sentimental and ironical apostrophes to these authors of his joys and woes.  “Oh, the women, the women, and the things they have made me do!” he would exclaim with a lustrous eye.  “C’est egal, of all the follies and stupidities I have committed for them I would not have missed one!” On this subject Newman maintained an habitual reserve; to expatiate largely upon it had always seemed to him a proceeding vaguely analogous to the cooing of pigeons and the chattering of monkeys, and even inconsistent with a fully developed human character.  But Bellegarde’s confidences greatly amused him, and rarely displeased him, for the generous young Frenchman was not a cynic.  “I really think,” he had once said, “that I am not more depraved than most of my contemporaries.  They are tolerably depraved, my contemporaries!” He said wonderfully pretty things about his female friends, and, numerous and various as they had been, declared that on the whole there was more good in them than harm.  “But you are not to take that as advice,” he added.  “As an authority I am very untrustworthy.  I’m prejudiced in their favor; I’m an idealist!” Newman listened to him with his impartial smile, and was glad, for his own sake, that he had fine feelings; but he mentally repudiated the idea of a Frenchman having discovered any merit in the amiable sex which he himself did not suspect.  M. de Bellegarde, however, did not confine his conversation to the autobiographical channel; he questioned our hero largely as to the events of his own life, and Newman told him some better