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Updated: June 21, 2025
M. de Bellegarde made a motion for him to pass first, and when Newman had gone out he shut himself into the room with Valentin. Newman had been a trifle bewildered by the audacious irony of the younger brother, and he had not needed its aid to point the moral of M. de Bellegarde's transcendent patronage.
Its ardor was in part the result of that general discomfort which the sight of all uninvested capital produced in him; so fine an intelligence as Bellegarde's ought to be dedicated to high uses. The highest uses known to Newman's experience were certain transcendent sagacities in the handling of railway stock.
When, a few moments later, he went to receive his visitor, he found him standing in the middle of his great gilded parlor and eying it from cornice to carpet. M. de Bellegarde's face, it seemed to Newman, expressed a sense of lively entertainment. "What the devil is he laughing at now?" our hero asked himself.
Valentin de Bellegarde's announcement of the secession of Mademoiselle Nioche from her father's domicile and his irreverent reflections upon the attitude of this anxious parent in so grave a catastrophe, received a practical commentary in the fact that M. Nioche was slow to seek another interview with his late pupil.
"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.
"Oh, leave him to me," said Newman, jovially. "I will watch over him and keep harm away." One evening, in Madame de Bellegarde's salon, the conversation had flagged most sensibly.
She always reminded him of a painted perfume-bottle with a crack in it; but he had grown to have a kindly feeling for her, based on the fact of her owing conjugal allegiance to Urbain de Bellegarde. He pitied M. de Bellegarde's wife, especially since she was a silly, thirstily-smiling little brunette, with a suggestion of an unregulated heart.
"Then the counts and the barons all the people you had the cruelty to introduce me to in a character of which you meant immediately to deprive me. I have made out a list." For a moment neither Madame de Bellegarde nor her son said a word; the old lady sat with her eyes upon the ground; M. de Bellegarde's blanched pupils were fixed upon her face.
This personage was a man of forty, with a tall lean figure, a sallow face, a dark eye, a neat mustache, and a pair of fresh gloves. He took off his hat, looking very grave, and pronounced Newman's name. Our hero assented and said, "You are M. de Bellegarde's friend?" "I unite with you in claiming that sad honor," said the gentleman.
He called out as he stalked forward in his bed coverlet: "Do you know anything else about it?" "Nothing," replied Jacques, thrusting his hands in his pockets; "but it has ruined Bellegarde's chances of living at Capello, the palace of delights." "And some one else has come back to Capello," I added. "Lisa, Peter Embden's niece."
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