'Anjou St. Honoré, 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-à-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. Here and there was one of
those uncomfortable tributes to elegance in which the upholsterer's art, in
France, is so prolific; a curtained recess with a sheet of looking-glass in
which, among the shadows, you could see nothing; a divan on which, for its
festoons and furbelows, you could not sit: a fireplace draped, flounced, and
frilled to the complete exclusion of fire. The young man's possessions were in
picturesque disorder, and his apartment was pervaded by the odour of cigars,
mingled with perfumes more inscrutable. Newman thought it a damp, gloomy place
to live in, and was puzzled by the obstructive and fragmentary character of the
furniture.
    Bellegarde, according to the custom of his country, talked very generously
about himself, and unveiled the mysteries of his private history with an
unsparing hand. Inevitably, he had a vast deal to say about women, and he used
frequently to indulge in sentimental and ironical apostrophes to these authors
of his joys and woes. »Oh, the women, the women, and the things they have made
me do!« he would exclaim with a lustrous eye. »C'est égal, of all the follies
and stupidities I have committed for them I would not have missed one!« On this
subject Newman maintained an habitual reserve; to expatiate largely upon it had
always seemed to him a proceeding vaguely analogous to the cooing of pigeons and
the chatterings of monkeys, and even inconsistent with a fully-developed human
character. 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