tached to me, and whom my mother
had formerly pensioned with an annuity of four hundred francs, spoke to
me as I was leaving the house that I had so often gaily left for a drive
in my childhood.

"'Be very economical, Monsieur Raphael!'

"The good fellow was crying.

"Such were the events, dear Emile, that ruled my destinies, moulded my
character, and set me, while still young, in an utterly false social
position," said Raphael after a pause. "Family ties, weak ones, it is
true, bound me to a few wealthy houses, but my own pride would have kept
me aloof from them if contempt and indifference had not shut their
doors on me in the first place. I was related to people who were very
influential, and who lavished their patronage on strangers; but I found
neither relations nor patrons in them. Continually circumscribed in my
affections, they recoiled upon me. Unreserved and simple by nature, I
must have appeared frigid and sophisticated. My father's discipline had
destroyed all confidence in myself. I was shy and awkward; I could not
believe that my opinion carried any weight whatever; I took no pleasure
in myself; I thought myself ugly, and was ashamed to meet my own
eyes. In spite of the inward voice that must be the stay of a man with
anything in him, in all his struggles, the voice that cries, 'Courage!
Go forward!' in spite of sudden revelations of my own strength in my
solitude; in spite of the hopes that thrilled me as I compared new
works, that the public admired so much, with the schemes that hovered in
my brain,--in spite of all this, I had a childish mistrust of myself.

"An overweening ambition preyed upon me; I believed that I was meant for
great things, and yet I felt myself to be nothing. I had need of other
men, and I was friendless. I found I must make my way in the world,
where I was quite alone, and bashful, rather than afraid.

"All through the year in which, by my father's wish, I threw myself into
the whirlpool of fashionable society, I came away with an inexperienced
heart, and fresh in mind. Like every grown child, I sighed in secret for
a love affair. I met, among young men of my own age, a set of swaggerers
who held their heads high, and talked about trifles as they seated
themselves without a tremor beside women who inspired awe in me. They
chattered nonsense, sucked the heads of their canes, gave themselves
affected airs, appropriated the fairest women, and laid, or pretended
that they had lai