 must have considered Newman's advances with mechanical politeness. Newman,
who was constantly forgetting himself, and indulging in an unlimited amount of
irresponsible inquiry and conjecture, now and then found himself confronted by
the conscious ironical smile of his host. What the deuce M. de Bellegarde was
smiling at he was at a loss to divine. M. de Bellegarde's smile may be supposed
to have been, for himself, a compromise between a great many emotions. So long
as he smiled he was polite, and it was proper he should be polite. A smile,
moreover, committed him to nothing more than politeness, and left the degree of
politeness agreeably vague. A smile, too, was neither dissent - which was too
serious - nor agreement, which might have brought on terrible complications. And
then a smile covered his own personal dignity, which in this critical situation
he was resolved to keep immaculate; it was quite enough that the glory of his
house should pass into eclipse. Between him and Newman, his whole manner seemed
to declare, there could be no interchange of opinion; he was holding his breath
so as not to inhale the odour of democracy. Newman was far from being versed in
European politics, but he liked to have a general idea of what was going on
about him, and he accordingly asked M. de Bellegarde several times what he
thought of public affairs. M. de Bellegarde answered with suave concision that
he thought as ill of them as possible, that they were going from bad to worse,
and that the age was rotten to its core. This gave Newman, for the moment, an
almost kindly feeling for the marquis; he pitied a man for whom the world was so
cheerless a place, and the next time he saw M. de Bellegarde he attempted to
call his attention to some of the brilliant features of the time. The marquis
presently replied that he had but a single political conviction, which was
enough for him: he believed in the divine right of Henry of Bourbon, Fifth of
his name, to the throne of France. Newman stared, and after this he ceased to
talk politics with M. de Bellegarde. He was not horrified nor scandalised, he
was not even amused; he felt as he should have felt if he had discovered in M.
de Bellegarde a taste for certain oddities of diet; an appetite, for instance,
for fishbones or nutshells. Under these circumstances, of course, he would never
have broached dietary questions with him.
    One afternoon, on his calling on Madame de Cintré, Newman was requested by
