But Bellegarde's confidences greatly
amused him, and rarely displeased him, for the generous young Frenchman
was not a cynic. "I really think," he had once said, "that I am not more
depraved than most of my contemporaries. They are tolerably depraved,
my contemporaries!" He said wonderfully pretty things about his female
friends, and, numerous and various as they had been, declared that on
the whole there was more good in them than harm. "But you are not
to take that as advice," he added. "As an authority I am very
untrustworthy. I'm prejudiced in their favor; I'm an IDEALIST!" Newman
listened to him with his impartial smile, and was glad, for his own
sake, that he had fine feelings; but he mentally repudiated the idea
of a Frenchman having discovered any merit in the amiable sex which he
himself did not suspect. M. de Bellegarde, however, did not confine his
conversation to the autobiographical channel; he questioned our hero
largely as to the events of his own life, and Newman told him some
better stories than any that Bellegarde carried in his budget. He
narrated his career, in fact, from the beginning, through all its
variations, and whenever his companion's credulity, or his habits of
gentility, appeared to protest, it amused him to heighten the color
of the episode.
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