domesticated individuals, with a pretty turn for mixing a salad.
Within the narrow but gay waistcoat of this son of Paris there beat as
kind a little eager French heart as one may wish to deal with.

"Bon Dieu!" Alphonse would exclaim, when convinced that he had been
robbed or cheated. "What will you? I am like that. I daresay the poor
devil wanted the money badly--and I do not miss it."

There is a charity that gives, and another that allows the needy to
take.

It was the Baron Giraud's great desire that Alphonse should be a
gentleman of the great world, moving in his narrow orbit in the first
circles of Parisian society, which was nothing to boast of in those
days, and has steadily declined ever since. To attain such an
eminence, the astute financier knew as well as any that only one thing
was really necessary--namely, money. This he gave to his son with an
open hand, and only gasped when he heard whither it went and how
freely Alphonse spent it.

"There is plenty more," he said, "behind." And his little porcine eyes
twinkled amid their yellow wrinkles. "I am a man of substance. You
must be a man of position. But do not lend to the wrong people. Rather
give to the right and be done with it. They will take it--bon Dieu!
You need not shake your head. There is no man who will refuse money if
you offer him enough."

And who shall say that the Baron Giraud was wrong?

A young man possessing a light heart and a heavy purse will never want
a friend in this kind world of ours. And Alphonse Giraud possessed,
moreover, a few of the better sort of friends, who had well-filled
purses of their own, and wanted nothing from him but his gay laugh and
good-fellowship. These were true friends, who did not scruple to tell
him, when they encountered him in the Bois de Boulogne, afoot or on
horseback, that while the right-hand side of his mustache was most
successfully en croc, the other extremity of the ornament pointed
earthwards. And, let it be remembered, that to tell a man of a defect
in his personal appearance is always a doubtful kindness.

"Ah, heavens!" Alphonse would exclaim to these true comrades, "I have
evil luck, and two minutes ago I bowed to the beautiful Comtesse de
Peudechose in her buggy."

Alphonse affected the society of Englishmen, was a member of the clubs
frequented by the sons of Albion resident in Paris, and sought the
society of the young gentlemen of the Embassy. It was in the
apartments of one of t