Possibly this listener’s faculty sufficiently explains the Chevalier’s popularity; he was always the spoiled child of the town, although he never quitted a drawing-room without carrying off about five livres in his pocket. Sometimes he lost, and he made the most of his losses, but it very seldom happened. All those who knew him say with one accord that never in any place have they met with so agreeable a mummy, not even in the Egyptian museum at Turin. Surely in no known country of the globe did parasite appear in such a benignant shape. Never did selfishness in its most concentrated form show itself so inoffensive, so full of good offices as in this gentleman; the Chevalier’s egoism was as good as another man’s devoted friendship. If any person went to ask M. de Valois to do some trifling service which the worthy Chevalier could not perform without inconvenience, that person never went away without conceiving a great liking for him, and departed fully convinced that the Chevalier could do nothing in the matter, or might do harm if he meddled with it.
To explain this problematical existence the chronicler is bound to admit, while Truth—that ruthless debauchee—has caught him by the throat, that latterly after the three sad, glorious Days of July, Alençon discovered that M. de Valois’ winnings at cards amounted to something like a hundred and fifty crowns every quarter, which amount the ingenious Chevalier intrepidly remitted to himself as an annuity, so that he might not appear to be without resources in a country with a great turn for practical details. Plenty of his friends—he was dead by that time, please to remark—plenty of his friends denied this in toto, they maintained that the stories were fables and slanders set in circulation by the Liberal party and that M. de Valois was an honorable and worthy gentleman. Luckily for clever gamblers, there will always be champions of this sort for them among the onlookers. Feeling ashamed to excuse wrongdoing, they stoutly deny that wrong has been done. Do not accuse them of wrong-headedness; they have their own sense of self-respect, and the Government sets them an example of the virtue which consists in burying its dead by night without chanting a Te Deum over a defeat. And suppose that M. de Valois permitted himself a neat stratagem that would have won Gramont’s esteem, a smile from Baron de Foeneste, and a shake of the hand from the Marquis de Moncade, was he any the less the pleasant dinner guest, the wit, the unvarying cardplayer, the charming retailer of anecdotes, the delight of Alençon? In what, moreover, does the action, lying, as it does, outside the laws of right and wrong, offend against the elegant code of a man of birth and breeding? When so many people are obliged to give pensions to others, what more natural than of one’s own accord to allow an annuity to one’s own best friend? But Laïus is dead. …
After some fifteen years of this kind of life, the Chevalier had amassed ten thousand and some odd hundred francs. When the Bourbons returned, he said that an old friend of his, M. le Marquis de Pombreton, late a lieutenant in the Black Musketeers, had returned a loan of twelve hundred pistoles with which he emigrated. The incident made a sensation. It was quoted afterwards as a set-off against droll stories in the Constitutionnel of the ways in which some émigrés paid their debts. The poor Chevalier used to blush all over the right side of his face whenever this noble trait in the Marquis de Pombreton came up in conversation. At the time everyone rejoiced with M. de Valois; he used to consult capitalists as to the best way of investing this wreck of his former fortune; and, putting faith in the Restoration, invested it all in Government stock when the funds had fallen to fifty-six francs twenty-five centimes. MM. de Lenoncourt, de Navarreins, de Verneuil, de Fontaine, and La Billardière, to whom he was known, had obtained a pension of a hundred crowns for him from the privy purse, he said, and the Cross of St. Louis. By what means the old Chevalier obtained the two solemn confirmations of his title and quality, no one ever knew; but this much is certain, the Cross of St. Louis gave him brevet rank as a colonel on a retiring pension, by reason of his services with the Catholic army in the West.
Besides the fiction of the annuity, to which no one gave a thought, the Chevalier was now actually possessed of a genuine income of a thousand francs. But with this improvement in his circumstances he made no change in his life or manners; only—the red ribbon looked wondrous well on his maroon coat; it was a finishing touch, as it were, to this portrait of a gentleman. Ever since the year 1802 the Chevalier had sealed his letters with an ancient gold seal, engraved roughly enough, but not so badly but that the Castérans, d’Esgrignons, and Troisvilles might see that he bore the arms of France impaled with his own, to wit, France per pale, gules two bars gemelles, a cross of five mascles conjoined or, on a chief sable a cross pattee argent over all; with a knight’s casquet for crest and the motto—Valeo. With these noble arms the so-called bastard Valois was entitled to ride in all the royal coaches in the world.
Plenty of people envied the old bachelor his easy life, made up of boston, trictrac, reversis, whist, and piquet; of good play, dinners well digested, pinches of snuff gracefully taken, and quiet walks abroad. Almost all Alençon thought that his existence was empty alike of ambitions and cares; but where is the man whose life is quite as simple as they suppose who envy him?
In the remotest country village you shall find human mollusks,
