Bellegarde did not in the least cause
him to modify his needful premise that all Frenchmen are of a frothy and
imponderable substance; he simply reminded him that light materials may
be beaten up into a most agreeable compound. No two companions could
be more different, but their differences made a capital basis for a
friendship of which the distinctive characteristic was that it was
extremely amusing to each.
Valentin de Bellegarde lived in the basement of an old house in the Rue
d'Anjou St. Honore, and his small apartments lay between the court of
the house and an old garden which spread itself behind it--one of those
large, sunless humid gardens into which you look unexpectingly in Paris
from back windows, wondering how among the grudging habitations they
find their space. When Newman returned Bellegarde's visit, he hinted
that HIS lodging was at least as much a laughing matter as his own. But
its oddities were of a different cast from those of our hero's
gilded saloons on the Boulevard Haussmann: the place was low, dusky,
contracted, and crowded with curious bric-a-brac. Bellegarde, penniless
patrician as he was, was an insatiable collector, and his walls were
covered with rusty arms and ancient panels and platters, his doorways
draped in faded tapestries, his floors muffled in the skins of beasts.
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