ly at the sight of a mother
walking with a marriageable daughter,--a sight which caused him as
painful an emotion as he formerly felt when a young man passed him
riding to the Bois, or driving in an elegant equipage. The sense of
his impotence told him that he could never hope for the best of even
secondary positions, nor for any easily won career; and he had heart
enough to feel constantly wounded, mind enough to make in his own breast
the bitterest of elegies.

Unfitted to struggle against circumstances, having an inward
consciousness of superior faculties without the will that could put them
in action, feeling himself incomplete, without force to undertake any
great thing, without resistance against the tastes derived from his
earlier life, his education, and his indolence, he was the victim of
three maladies, any one of which would be enough to sicken of life a
young man long alienated from religious faith.

Thus it was that Godefroid presented, even to the eye, the face that we
meet so often in Paris that it might be called the type of the Parisian;
in it we may see ambitions deceived or dead, inward wretchedness, hatred
sleeping in the indolence of a life passed in watching the daily and
external life of Paris, apathy which seeks stimulation, lament without
talent, a mimicry of strength, the venom of past disappointments
which excites to cynicism, and spits upon all that enlarges and grows,
misconceives all necessary authority, rejoicing in its embarrassments,
and will not hold to any social form. This Parisian malady is to the
active and permanent impulse towards conspiracy in persons of energy
what the sapwood is to the sap of the trees; it preserves it, feeds it,
and conceals it.

II. OLD HOUSE, OLD PEOPLE, OLD CUSTOMS

Weary of himself, Godefroid attempted one day to give a meaning to his
life, after meeting a former comrade who had been the tortoise in the
fable, while he in earlier days had been the hare. In one of those
conversations which arise when schoolmates meet again in after years,--a
conversation held as they were walking together in the sunshine on the
boulevard des Italiens,--he was startled to learn the success of a
man endowed apparently with less gifts, less means, less fortune than
himself; but who had bent his will each morning to the purpose resolved
upon the night before. The sick soul then determined to imitate that
simple action.

"Social existence is like the soil," his comra