Henry James - Henry James - The Complete Novels (The Greatest Novelists of All Time – Book 10)

“Well, here I am as large as life,” said Newman, extending his legs.

“I don’t know what you mean,” the young man went on “by giving me unlimited leave to laugh. Certainly I am a great laugher, and it is better to laugh too much than too little. But it is not in order that we may laugh together — or separately — that I have, I may say, sought your acquaintance. To speak with almost impudent frankness, you interest me!” All this was uttered by M. de Bellegarde with the modulated smoothness of the man of the world, and in spite of his excellent English, of the Frenchman; but Newman, at the same time that he sat noting its harmonious flow, perceived that it was not mere mechanical urbanity. Decidedly, there was something in his visitor that he liked. M. de Bellegarde was a foreigner to his finger-tips, and if Newman had met him on a Western prairie he would have felt it proper to address him with a “How-d’ye-do, Mosseer?” But there was something in his physiognomy which seemed to cast a sort of aerial bridge over the impassable gulf produced by difference of race. He was below the middle height, and robust and agile in figure. Valentin de Bellegarde, Newman afterwards learned, had a mortal dread of the robustness overtaking the agility; he was afraid of growing stout; he was too short, as he said, to afford a belly. He rode and fenced and practiced gymnastics with unremitting zeal, and if you greeted him with a “How well you are looking” he started and turned pale. In your WELL he read a grosser monosyllable. He had a round head, high above the ears, a crop of hair at once dense and silky, a broad, low forehead, a short nose, of the ironical and inquiring rather than of the dogmatic or sensitive cast, and a mustache as delicate as that of a page in a romance. He resembled his sister not in feature, but in the expression of his clear, bright eye, completely void of introspection, and in the way he smiled. The great point in his face was that it was intensely alive — frankly, ardently, gallantly alive. The look of it was like a bell, of which the handle might have been in the young man’s soul: at a touch of the handle it rang with a loud, silver sound. There was something in his quick, light brown eye which assured you that he was not economizing his consciousness. He was not living in a corner of it to spare the furniture of the rest. He was squarely encamped in the centre and he was keeping open house. When he smiled, it was like the movement of a person who in emptying a cup turns it upside down: he gave you the last drop of his jollity. He inspired Newman with something of the same kindness that our hero used to feel in his earlier years for those of his companions who could perform strange and clever tricks — make their joints crack in queer places or whistle at the back of their mouths.

“My sister told me,” M. de Bellegarde continued, “that I ought to come and remove the impression that I had taken such great pains to produce upon you; the impression that I am a lunatic. Did it strike you that I behaved very oddly the other day?”

“Rather so,” said Newman.

“So my sister tells me.” And M. de Bellegarde watched his host for a moment through his smoke-wreaths. “If that is the case, I think we had better let it stand. I didn’t try to make you think I was a lunatic, at all; on the contrary, I wanted to produce a favorable impression. But if, after all, I made a fool of myself, it was the intention of Providence. I should injure myself by protesting too much, for I should seem to set up a claim for wisdom which, in the sequel of our acquaintance, I could by no means justify. Set me down as a lunatic with intervals of sanity.”

“Oh, I guess you know what you are about,” said Newman.

“When I am sane, I am very sane; that I admit,” M. de Bellegarde answered. “But I didn’t come here to talk about myself. I should like to ask you a few questions. You allow me?”

“Give me a specimen,” said Newman.

“You live here all alone?”

“Absolutely. With whom should I live?”

“For the moment,” said M. de Bellegarde with a smile “I am asking questions, not answering them. You have come to Paris for your pleasure?”

Newman was silent a while. Then, at last, “Every one asks me that!” he said with his mild slowness. “It sounds so awfully foolish.”

“But at any rate you had a reason.”

“Oh, I came for my pleasure!” said Newman. “Though it is foolish, it is true.”

“And you are enjoying it?”

Like any other good American, Newman thought it as well not to truckle to the foreigner. “Oh, so-so,” he answered.

M. de Bellegarde puffed his cigar again in silence. “For myself,” he said at last, “I am entirely at your service. Anything I can do for you I shall be very happy to do. Call upon me at your convenience. Is there any one you desire to know — anything you wish to see? It is a pity you should not enjoy Paris.”

“Oh, I do enjoy it!” said Newman, good-naturedly. “I’m much obligated to you.”

“Honestly speaking,” M. de Bellegarde went on, “there is something absurd to me in hearing myself make you these offers. They represent a great deal of goodwill, but they represent little else. You are a successful man and I am a failure, and it’s a turning of the tables to talk as if I could lend you a hand.”

“In what way are you a failure?” asked Newman.

“Oh, I’m not a tragical failure!” cried the young man with a laugh. “I have fallen from a height, and my fiasco has made no noise. You, evidently, are a success. You have made a fortune, you have built up an edifice, you are a financial, commercial power, you can travel about the world until you have found a soft spot, and lie down in it with the consciousness of having earned your rest. Is not that true? Well, imagine the exact reverse of all that, and you have me. I have done nothing — I can do nothing!”

“Why not?”

“It’s a long story. Some day I will tell you. Meanwhile, I’m right, eh? You are a success? You have made a fortune? It’s none of my business, but, in short, you are rich?”

“That’s 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 favor 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, was enough to occupy comfortably a young man of ordinary good parts. But all that he was he was by instinct and not by theory, and the amiability of his character was so great that certain of the aristocratic virtues, which in some aspects seem rather brittle and trenchant, acquired in his application of them an extreme geniality. In his younger years he had been suspected of low tastes, and his mother had greatly feared he would make a slip in the mud of the highway and bespatter the family shield. He had been treated, therefore, to more than his share of schooling and drilling, but his instructors had not succeeded in mounting him upon stilts. They could not spoil his safe spontaneity, and he remained the least cautious and the most lucky of young nobles. He had been tied with so short a rope in his youth that he had now a mortal grudge against family discipline. He had been known to say, within the limits of the family, that, light-headed as he was, the honor of the name was safer in his hands than in those of some of it’s other members, and that if a day ever came to try it, they should see. His talk was an odd mixture of almost boyish garrulity and of the reserve and discretion of the man of the world, and he seemed to Newman, as afterwards young members of the Latin races often seemed to him, now amusingly juvenile and now appallingly mature. In America, Newman reflected, lads of twenty-five and thirty have old heads and young hearts, or at least young morals; here they have young heads and very aged hearts, morals the most grizzled and wrinkled.