Valentin de Bellegarde
was, by his own confession, at all times a great chatterer, and on this
occasion he was evidently in a particularly loquacious mood. It was a
tradition of his race that people of its blood always conferred a favor
by their smiles, and as his enthusiasms were as rare as his civility was
constant, he had a double reason for not suspecting that his friendship
could ever be importunate. Moreover, the flower of an ancient stem as
he was, tradition (since I have used the word) had in his temperament
nothing of disagreeable rigidity. It was muffled in sociability and
urbanity, as an old dowager in her laces and strings of pearls. Valentin
was what is called in France a gentilhomme, of the purest source, and
his rule of life, so far as it was definite, was to play the part of a
gentilhomme. This, it seemed to him, was enough to occupy comfortably a
young man of ordinary good parts. But all that he was he was by instinct
and not by theory, and the amiability of his character was so great that
certain of the aristocratic virtues, which in some aspects seem rather
brittle and trenchant, acquired in his application of them an extreme
geniality. In his younger years he had been suspected of low tastes,
and his mother had greatly feared he would make a slip in the mud of the
highway and bespatter the family shield.
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