another thing that it sounds foolish to say,« said Newman. »Hang it,
no man is rich!«
    »I have heard philosophers affirm,« laughed M. de Bellegarde, »that no man
was poor; but your formula strikes me as an improvement. As a general thing, I
confess, I don't like successful people, and I find clever men who have made
great fortunes very offensive. They tread on my toes; they make me
uncomfortable. But as soon as I saw you, I said to myself, Ah, there is a man
with whom I shall get on. He has the good-nature of success and none of the
morgue; he has not our confoundedly irritable French vanity. In short, I took a
fancy to you. We are very different, I'm sure; I don't believe there is a
subject on which we think or feel alike. But I rather think we shall get on, for
there is such a thing, you know, as being too different to quarrel.«
    »Oh, I never quarrel,« said Newman.
    »Never? Sometimes it's a duty - or at least it's a pleasure. Oh, I have had
two or three delicious quarrels in my day!« and M. de Bellegarde's handsome
smile assumed, at the memory of these incidents, an almost voluptuous intensity.
    With the preamble embodied in his share of the foregoing fragment of
dialogue, he paid our hero a long visit; as the two men sat with their heels on
Newman's glowing hearth, they heard the small hours of the morning striking
larger from a far-off belfry. Valentin de Bellegarde was, by his own confession,
at all times a great chatterer, and on this occasion he was evidently in a
particularly loquacious mood. It was a tradition of his race that people of its
blood always conferred a favour by their smiles, and as his enthusiasms were as
rare as his civility was constant, he had a double reason for not suspecting
that his friendship could ever be importunate. Moreover, the flower of an
ancient stem as he was, tradition (since I have used the word) had in his
temperament nothing of disagreeable rigidity. It was muffled in sociability and
urbanity, as an old dowager in her laces and strings of pearls. Valentin was
what is called in France a gentilhomme, of the purest source, and his rule of
life, so far as it was definite, was to play the part of a gentilhomme. This, it
seemed to him