"
"I hope that will be soon! Then, if I can help you to gain it, I shall
be happy."
"Perhaps you may," said Newman.
"Don't forget, then, that I am your servant," M. de Bellegarde answered;
and shortly afterwards he took his departure.
During the next three weeks Newman saw Bellegarde several times, and
without formally swearing an eternal friendship the two men established
a sort of comradeship. To Newman, Bellegarde was the ideal Frenchman,
the Frenchman of tradition and romance, so far as our hero was concerned
with these mystical influences. Gallant, expansive, amusing, more
pleased himself with the effect he produced than those (even when
they were well pleased) for whom he produced it; a master of all the
distinctively social virtues and a votary of all agreeable sensations;
a devotee of something mysterious and sacred to which he occasionally
alluded in terms more ecstatic even than those in which he spoke of the
last pretty woman, and which was simply the beautiful though somewhat
superannuated image of HONOR; he was irresistibly entertaining and
enlivening, and he formed a character to which Newman was as capable of
doing justice when he had once been placed in contact with it, as he was
unlikely, in musing upon the possible mixtures of our human ingredients,
mentally to have foreshadowed it.
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