aves gens," the very roughest and least-polished
specimens of the polite nation. In all his intercourse with them, Eugene
affected the easiest tone of camaradere and equality, never assuming in
the slightest, nor making any pretensions to the least superiority on
the score of position or acquirements, but on the whole consoling
himself, as it were, by "playing them off," in their several
eccentricities, and rendering every trait of their vulgarity and
ignorance tributary to his own amusement. Partly from seeing that he
made me an exception to this practice, and partly from his perceiving
the amusement it afforded me, we drew closer toward each other, and
before many days elapsed, had become sworn friends.

There is probably no feature of character so very attractive to a young
man as frankness. The most artful of all flatteries is that which
addresses itself by candor, and seems at once to select, as it were, by
intuition, the object most suited fur a confidence. Santron carried me
by a _coup de main_ of this kind, as taking my arm one evening, as I was
strolling along the banks of the Moselle, he said,

"My dear Maurice, it's very easy to see that the society of our
excellent friends yonder is just as distasteful to you as to me. One can
not always be satisfied laughing at their solecisms in breeding and
propriety. One grows weary at last of ridiculing their thousand
absurdities; and then there comes the terrible retribution in the
reflection of what the devil brought me into such company? a question
that, however easily answered, grows more and more intolerable the
oftener it is asked. To be sure, in my case there was little choice in
the matter, for I was not in any way the arbiter of my own fortune. I
saw myself converted from a royal page to a printer's devil by a kind
old fellow, who saved my life by smearing my face with ink, and covering
my scarlet uniform with a filthy blouse; and since that day I have
taken the hint, and often found the lesson a good one--the dirtier the
safer!

"We were of the old nobility of France, but as the name of our family
was the cause of its extinction, I took care to change it. I see you
don't clearly comprehend me, and so I'll explain myself better. My
father lived unmolested during the earlier days of the revolution, and
might so have continued to the end, if a detachment of the Garde
Republicaine had not been dispatched to our neighborhood of Sarre Louis,
where it was supposed