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 stories than any that Bellegarde carried in his budget. He
narrated his career, in fact, from the beginning, through all its
variations, and whenever his companion's credulity, or his habits of
gentility, appeared to p