oor uncle, a heart consumed
by charity, a child of seventy years, as clear-sighted as God, as
guileless as a man of genius, no doubt read the tumult of my soul; for
when he felt the tether by which he held me strained too tightly and
ready to break, he would never fail to say, 'Here, Maurice, you too
are poor! Here are twenty francs; go and amuse yourself, you are not a
priest!' And if you could have seen the dancing light that gilded his
gray eyes, the smile that relaxed his fine lips, puckering the corners
of his mouth, the adorable expression of that august face, whose native
ugliness was redeemed by the spirit of an apostle, you would understand
the feeling which made me answer the Cure of White Friars only with a
kiss, as if he had been my mother.

"'In Comte Octave you will find not a master, but a friend,' said my
uncle on the way to the Rue Payenne. 'But he is distrustful, or to be
more exact, he is cautious. The statesman's friendship can be won only
with time; for in spite of his deep insight and his habit of gauging
men, he was deceived by the man you are succeeding, and nearly became a
victim to his abuse of confidence. This is enough to guide you in your
behavior to him.'

"When we knocked at the enormous outer door of a house as large as the
Hotel Carnavalet, with a courtyard in front and a garden behind, the
sound rang as in a desert. While my uncle inquired of an old porter in
livery if the Count were at home, I cast my eyes, seeing everything
at once, over the courtyard where the cobblestones were hidden in the
grass, the blackened walls where little gardens were flourishing above
the decorations of the elegant architecture, and on the roof, as high as
that of the Tuileries. The balustrade of the upper balconies was eaten
away. Through a magnificent colonnade I could see a second court on one
side, where were the offices; the door was rotting. An old coachman
was there cleaning an old carriage. The indifferent air of this servant
allowed me to assume that the handsome stables, where of old so many
horses had whinnied, now sheltered two at most. The handsome facade of
the house seemed to me gloomy, like that of a mansion belonging to the
State or the Crown, and given up to some public office. A bell rang as
we walked across, my uncle and I, from the porter's lodge--_Inquire of
the Porter_ was still written over the door--towards the outside steps,
where a footman came out in a livery like that of Labran