Ramel, smiling. "No,
I am too old, and never having asked any one for anything, I am not
going to begin at my age."

"You do not ask, it is offered you."

"Well, I have no desire for that. I am at the hour of the _far niente_
that precedes the final slumber. It is a pleasant condition. One has
seen so many things and persons that one has no further desires."

"The fact is," said the minister, "that if all the people you have
obligated in your life had solicited an invitation from Madame Marsy,
these salons would not be large enough to contain them."

"Bah! they have all forgotten as I have, myself," said Ramel, with a
shake of his head and smiling pleasantly.

Vaudrey felt intense pleasure in meeting, in the midst of this crowd of
indifferent or admiring persons, the man who had formerly seen him
arrive in Paris, and with whom he had corresponded from the heart of his
province, as with a kinsman. There was, in fact, between them, a
relationship of mind and soul that united this veteran of the press with
this young statesman.

The ideal sought was the same, but the temperaments were different.
Ramel, although he had known them, had for a long time avoided those
excitements of struggle and power that inflamed Vaudrey's blood.

"It was a glorious day when my pulse became regulated," he said.
"Experience brought me the needed tonic."

Denis Ramel was a wise man. He took life as he found it, without
enthusiasm as without bitterness. He was not wealthy. More than sixty
years old, he found himself, after a life of hard, rough and continuous
struggle, as badly off as when he started out on his career, full of
burning hopes. He had passed his life honorably as a journalist--a
journalist of the good old times, of the school of thought, not of
news-tellers,--he had loyally and conscientiously exercised a profession
in which he took pleasure; he had read much, written much, consumed much
midnight oil, touched upon everything; put his fingers into every kind
of pie without soiling them, and after having valiantly turned the heavy
millstone of daily labor incessantly renewed for forty years, he had
reached the end of his journey, the brink of the grave, almost
penniless, after having skirted Fortune and seen Opportunity float
toward him her perfumed and intoxicating locks more than a hundred
times. Bent, weary, almost forgotten, and unknown and misunderstood by
the new generation, that styled this enthusiasm, more eager, mo