t seem at all set up or in the
least like large stockholders. I never envied them. I rather think the thing is
an accomplishment of your own.«
    »Oh, come,« said Newman, »you will make me proud!«
    »No, I shall not. You have nothing to do with pride, or with humility - that
is a part of this easy manner of yours. People are proud only when they have
something to lose, and humble when they have something to gain.«
    »I don't know what I have to lose,« said Newman, »but I certainly have
something to gain.«
    »What is it?« asked his visitor.
    Newman hesitated awhile. »I will tell you when I know you better.«
    »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 acquainted 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 honour; 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. 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
