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Ithought that here I should find the country; a village like a hundred others, with long roofs of thatch or tiles, with crannied walls and shaky doors, and in the courts a pell-mell of carts with fagots, and tools, and domestic animals, in short, the whole picturesque and charming unconstraint of country life. I find a Paris street and the promenades of the Bois de Boulogne.
Never was country less countrified: you skirt a row of houses drawn up in line, like a row of soldiers when carrying arms, all pierced regularly with regular windows, decked with signs and posters, bordered by a side-walk, and having the disagreeably decent aspect ofhotels garnis.These uniform buildings, mathematical lines, this disciplined and formal architecture make a laughable contrast with thegreen ridges that flank them. It seems grotesque that a little warm water should have imported into these mountain hollows civilization and the cuisine.
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This singular village tries every year to extend itself, and with great difficulty, so straitened and stifled is it in its ravine; they break the rock, they open trenches on the declivity, they suspend houses over the torrent, they stick others, as it were, to the side of the mountain, they pile up their chimneys even to the roots of the beech-trees; thus they construct behind the principal street a melancholy lanewhich dips down or raises itself as it can, muddy, steep, half filled with temporary stalls and wooden wine-shops, lodging-places of artisans and guides; at last it drops down to the Gave, into a nook decked out with drying linen, which is washed in the same place with the hogs.
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Of all places in the world, Eaux Bonnes is the most unpleasant on a rainy day, and rainy days are frequent there; the clouds are engulfed between two walls of the valley of Ossau, and crawl slowlyalong half way up the height; the summits disappear, the floating masses come together, accumulate because the gorge has no outlet, and fall in fine cold rain. The village becomes a prison; the fog creeps to the earth, envelopes the houses, extinguishes the light already obscured by the mountain; the English might think themselves in London.
The visitors look through the window-panes at the jumbled forms of the trees, the water that drips from the leaves, the mourning of the shivering and humid woods; they listen to the gallop of belated riders, who return with clinging and pendent skirts, like fine birds with their plumage disordered by the rain; they try whist in their despondency; some go down to the reading-room and ask for the most blood-stained pages of Paul Féval or Frédéric Souliê; they can read nothing but the gloomiest dramas; they discover leanings towards suicide in themselves, and construct the theory of assassination. They look at the clock and bethink themselves that the doctor has ordered them to drink three times a day; then they button up their overcoats with an air of resignation, and climb the long, stiff slope of the streaming road; the lines of umbrellas and soaked mantles are a pitiable spectacle; they come, splashing through the water, and seat themselves in the drinking-hall. Each one takes his syrup-flask from its numbered place on a sortof étagère, and the throng of the drinkers form in line about the tap. For the rest, patience is soon acquired here; amid such idleness the mind goes to sleep, the fog puts an end to ideas, and you follow the crowd mechanically; you act only at the instigation of others, and you look at objects without receiving from them any reaction.
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After the first glass, you wait an hour before taking another; meanwhile you march up and down, elbowed by the dense groups, who drag themselves laboriously along between the columns. Not a seat to be had, except two wooden benches where the ladies sit, with their feet resting upon the damp stones: the economy of the administration supposes that the weather is always fine. Wearied and dejected faces pass before the eyes without awaking any interest. For the twentieth time you look overthe marble trinkets, the shop with razors and scissors, a map that hangs on the wall. What is there that one is not capable of on a rainy day, if obliged to keep moving for an hour between four walls, amidst the buzzing of two hundred people? You study the posters, contemplate assiduously some figures which pretend to represent the manners of the country: these are elegant and rosy shepherds, who lead to the dance smiling shepherdesses rosier than themselves. You stretch your neck out at the door only to see a gloomy passage where invalids are soaking their feet in a trough of warm water, all in a row like school-children on cleaning and excursion days. After these distractions you return to your lodging, and find yourselves tête-à-tête, in close conversation with your chest of drawers and your light-stand.
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People who have any appetite take refuge at the table; they did not count upon the musicians. First we saw a blind man come in, a heavy, thick-headed Spaniard, then the violinists of the country, then another blind man. They play pot-pourris of waltzes, country dances, bits from operas, strung one upon another, galloping along, above the note or below it, with admirable fearlessness, despoiling every repertory in their musical race. The next day we had three Germans, tall as towers, stiff as stones, perfectly phlegmatic, playing without a gesture and passing the plate without a word; at least they play in time.
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On the third day the musicians ofa neighboring village appeared, a violin and flageolet; they executed their piece with such energy and discord, in tones so piercing, so long-drawn-out and rending, that, by universal consent, they were put out doors. They began again under the windows.
A good appetite is a consolation for all ills; so much the worse if you will, or so much the better for humanity. It is necessary to bear up against the tediousness, the rain and the music of Eaux Bonnes. The renewed blood then bears gayety to the brain, and the body persuades the soul that everything is for the best in the best of worlds. You will have pity on those poor musicians as you leave the table; Voltaire has proved that an easy digestion induces compassion, and that a good stomach gives a good heart. Between forty and fifty years of age, a man is handsome when, after dinner, he folds up his napkin and begins his indispensable promenade. He walks with legs apart, chest out, resting heavily on his stick, his cheeks colored by a slight warmth, humming between his teeth some old refrain of his youth; it seems to him that the universe is brought nicely together; he smiles and is bland, he is the first to reach you his hand. What machines we are! Yet why complain of it? My good neighbor would tell you that you have the key of your mechanism;turn the spring toward the side of happiness. This may be kitchen philosophy,—very well. He who practised it did not trouble himself about the name.
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On sunny days, we live in the open air. A sort of yard, called the English garden, stretches between the street and the mountain, carpeted with a poor turf, withered and full of holes; the ladies constitute it their drawing-room and work there; the dandies, lying on several chairs at once, read their journal and proudly smoke their cigar; the little girls, in embroidered pantalons, chatter with coquettish gestures and graceful little ways; they are trying in advance the parts they will play as lovely dolls. But for the red cassocks of the little jumping peasants, the aspect is that of the Champs Elysees. You leave this spot by beautiful shaded walks which mount in zigzags upon the flanks of the twomountains, one above the torrent, the other above the city; toward noon, numbers of bathers may be met here lying upon the heather, nearly all with a novel in hand.
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These lovers of the country resemble the banker who loved concerts; he enjoyed them because then he could calculate his dividends. Pardon these hapless creatures; they are punished for knowing how to read and not knowing how to look about.
Anomalous beeches sustain the slopes here; no description can give an idea of these stunted colossi, eight feet high, and round whichthree men could not reach. Beaten back by the wind that desolates the declivity, their sap has been accumulating for centuries in huge, stunted, twisted and interlaced branches; all embossed with knots misshapen and blackened, they stretch and coil themselves fantastically, like limbs swollen by disease and distended by a supreme effort.
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Through the split bark may be seen the vegetable muscles enrolling themselves about the trunk, and crushing each other like the limbs of wrestlers. These squat torsos, half overthrown, almost horizontal, lean toward the plain; but their feet bury themselves among the rocks with such ties, thatsooner than break that forest of roots, one might tear out a side of the mountain. Now and then a trunk, rotted by water, breaks open, hideously eventerated; the edges of the wound spread farther apart with every year; they wear no longer the shape of trees, and yet they live, and cannot be conquered by winter, by their slope, nor by time, but boldly put forth into their native air their whitish shoots. If, under the shades of evening, you pass by the tortured tops and yawning trunks of these old inhabitants of the mountains, when the wind is beating the branches, you seem to hear a hollow plaint, extorted by a century’s toil; these strange forms recall the fantastic creatures of the old Scandinavian mythology. You think on the giants imprisoned by fate, between walls that contracted day by day, and bent them down and lessened them, and then returned them to the light, after a thousand years of torture, furious, misshapen and dwarfed.
Toward four o’clock the cavalcades return; the small horses of the country are gentle, and gallop without too much effort; far away in the sunlight gleam the white and luminous veils of the ladies; nothing is more graceful than a pretty woman on horseback, when she is neitherimprisoned in a black riding-habit, nor topped with a chimney-pot hat. Nobody here wears this funereal, poverty-stricken English costume; in a gay country people assume gay colors; the sun is a oood counsellor. It is forbidden to return at a gallop, o which is reason enough why everybody should return at that gait. Ah, the great art of imitating the coming in of the cattle! They bend in the saddle, the highway resounds, the windows quiver, they sweep proudly before the saunterers who stop to gaze; it is a triumph; the administration of Eaux Bonnes does not know the human heart, especially the heart of woman.
In the evening, everybody meets on a level promenade; it is a flat road half a league long, cut in the mountain of Gourzy. The remainder of the country is nothing but steeps and precipices; any one who for eight days has known the fatigue of climbing bent double, of stumbling down hill, of studying the laws of equilibrium while flat on his back, will find it agreeable to walk on level ground, and to move his feet freely without thinking of his head; it gives a perfectly new sensation of security and ease.
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The road winds along a wooded hill-side, furrowed by winter torrents into whitish ravines; a few wasted springs slip away under the stones in their stream beds, and cover them with climbing plants; you walk under themassive beeches, then skirt along an inclined plane, peopled with ferns, where feed the tinkling herds; the heat has abated, the air is soft, a perfume of healthy and wild verdure reaches you on the lightest breeze; fair white-robed promenaders pass by in the twilight with ruffles of lace and floating muslins that rise and flutter like the wings of a bird. Every day we went to a seat upon a rock at the end of this road; from there, through the whole valley of Ossau, you follow the torrent grown into a river; the rich valley, a mosaic of yellow harvests and green fields, broadly opens out to the confines of the landscape, and allows the eye to lose itself in the dim distance of Béarn. From each side three mountains strike out their feet towards the river, and cause the outline of the plain to rise and fall in waves; the furthest slope down like pyramids, and their pale blue declivities stand out upon the rosy zone of the dim sky. In the depth of the gorges it is already dark; but turn around and you may see the summit of the Ger, gleaming with a soft carnation cherishing the last smile of the sun.
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On Sunday a procession of fine toilets goes up toward the church. This church is a round box, of stone and plaster, built for fifty persons but made to hold two hundred. Every half-hour the tide of the faithful ebbs and flows. Invalid priests abound and say as many masses as may be wanted: everything at Eaux Bonnes suffers for want of room; they form in line for prayers as for drinking, and are as crowded at the chapel as at the tap.
Occasionally a purveyor of public pleasures undertakes the duty of enlivening the afternoon; an eloquent poster announces thejeu du canard. They fasten a perch to a tree, a cord to the perch, and a duck to the cord; the most serious-minded people follow the preparation with marked interest. I have seen men who yawn at the opera form a ring, under a hot sun, for a whole hour in order to witness the decapitation of the poor hanging creature. If you are generous-minded and greedyof sensations in addition, you give two sous to a small boy; in consideration of which he has his eyes bandaged, is made to turn round and round, has an old sabre given to him, and is pushed forward, in the midst of the laughter and outcry of the spectators.
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“Right! left! halloo! strike! forward!” he knows not which to heed, and cuts away into the air. If by rare chance he hits the creature, if by rarer chance he strikes the neck, or if, indeed, he takes off the head by miracle, he carries off the duck to have it cooked, and eat it. The public is not exacting in matter of amusement. If it were announced that a mouse was to drown itself in a pool, they would run as if to a fire."Why not?” said my neighbor, an odd, abrupt sort of man: “This is a tragedy and a perfectly regular one; see if it has not all the classic parts. First, the exposition; the instruments of torture that are displayed, the crowd which comes together, the distance that is marked, the animal that is fastened up. It is a protasis of the complex order, as M. Lysidas used to say. Secondly, the action; every time that a small boy starts, you are in suspense, you rise on tip-toe, your heart leaps, you are as interested in the pendent animal as in a fellow-creature. Do you say that the action is always the same? Simplicity is the characteristic of great works, and this one is after the Indian style. Thirdly, the catastrophe; if ever it was bloody it is so here. As to the passions, they are those demanded by Aristotle, terror and pity. See how shiveringly the poor creature lifts its head, when it feels the current of air from the sword! With what a lamentable and resigned look it awaits the stroke! The chorus of spectators takes part in the action, praises or blames, just as in the antique tragedy. In short, the public is right in being amused, and pleasure is never wrong.”
“You talk like la Harpe; this duck would accept his lot in patience, if he could hear you. And the ball, what do you say of that?”
“It is worth as much as the one at the Hôtel deFrance with fine people; our dancing is nothing but walking, a pretext for conversation. Look how the servants and the guides dance; such cuts and pigeon wings! they go into it from pure fun, with all their heart, they feel the pleasure of motion, the impulse of their muscles; this is the true dance invented by joy and the need of physical activity. These fellows fall to and handle each other like timbers. That great girl there is servant at my hotel; say, does not that tall figure, that serious air, that proud attitude, recall the statues of antiquity? Force and health are always the first of beauties. Do you think that the languid graces, the conventional smiles of our quadrilles would bring together all this crowd? We get further away from Nature with every day; our life is all in the brain, and we spend our time in composing and listening to set phrases. See how I am uttering them now; to-morrow, I turn over a new leaf, buy a stout stick, put on gaiters and tramp over the country. You do the same; let each go his own way, and try not to come together.”
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Ihave determined to find some pleasure in my walks; have come out alone by the first path that offered itself, and walk straight on as chance may lead. Provided you have noted two or three prominent points, you are sure of finding the way back. You can now enjoy the unexpected, and discover the country. To know where you are going and by what way is certain boredom; the imagination deflowers the landscape in advance. It works and builds according to its own pleasure; then when you reach your goal all must be overturned; that spoils your disposition; the mind keeps its bent, and the beauty it has fancied prejudices that which it sees; it fails to understandthis, because it is already taken up with another. I suffered a most grievous disenchantment when I saw the sea for the first time: it was a morning in autumn; flecks of purplish cloud dappled the sky; a gentle breeze covered the sea with little uniform waves. I seemed to see one of those long stretches of beet-root that are found in the environs of Paris, intersected by patches of green cabbages and bands of russet barley. The distant sails looked like the wings of homeward-bound pigeons. The view seemed to me confined; the artists, in their pictures, had represented the sea as greater. It was three days before I could get back the sensation of immensity.
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The course of the Valentin is nothing but a long fall between multitudes of rocks. All along thepromenade Eynard,for half a league, you may hear it rumbling under your feet.
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At the bridge of Discoo, its standing-ground fails it altogether; it falls into an amphitheatre, from shelf to shelf, in jets that cross each other and mingle their flakes of foam; then under an arcade of rocks and stones, it eddies in deep basins, whose edges it has polished, and where the grayish emerald of its waters diffuses a soft and peaceful reflection.
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Suddenly it makes a leap of thirty feet in three dark masses, and rolls in silver spray down a funnel of verdure. A fine dew gushes over the turf and gives life to it, and its rolling pearls sparkle as they glide along the leaves. Our northern fields afford no notion of such vividness; this unceasing coolness with this fiery sun is needed in order to paint the vegetable robe with such a magnificent hue.
I saw a great, wooded mountain-side stretch sloping away before me; the noonday sun beat down upon it; the mass of white rays pierced through the vault of the trees; the leaves glowed in splendor, either transparent or radiated. Over all this lighted slope no shadow could be distinguished; a warm, luminous evaporation covered all, like the white veil of a woman. I have often since seen this strange garb of the mountains, especially towards evening; the bluish atmosphere enclosed in the gorges becomes visible; it grows thick, it imprisons the light and makes it palpable. The eye delights in penetrating into the fair network of gold that envelopes the ridges, sensitive to the softness and depth of it; the salient edges lose their hardness, the harsh contours are softened; it is heaven, descending and lending its veil to cover the nakedness of the savage daughters of the earth. Pardon me these metaphors; I appear,perhaps, to be studying turns of expression, and yet I am only recounting my sensations.
From this place a meadow-path leads to the gorge of the Serpent: this is a gigantic notch in the perpendicular mountain. The brook that runs through it crawls along overborne by heaped-up blocks; its bed is nothing but a ruin.
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You ascend along a crumbling pathway, clinging to the stems of box and to the edges of rocks; frightened lizards start off like an arrow, and cower in the clefts of slaty slabs. A leaden sun inflames the bluish rocks; the reflected rays make the air like a furnace. In this parched chaos the only life is that of the water, which glides, murmuring, beneath the stones. At the bottom of the ravine the mountain abruptly lifts its vertical wall to the height of two hundred feet; the water drops in long white threads along this polished wall, and turns its reddish tint to brown; during the whole fall it does not quit the cliff, but clings to it like silverytresses, or a pendent garland of convolvulus. A fine broad basin stays it for an instant at the foot of the mountain, and then discharges it in a streamlet into the bog.
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These mountain streams are unlike those of the plains; nothing sullies them; they never have any other bed than sand or naked stone. However deep they may be, you may count their blue pebbles; they are transparent as the air. Rivers have no other diversity than that of their banks; their regular course, their mass always gives the same sensation; the Gave, on the other hand, is a forever-changing spectacle; the human face has not more marked, more diverse expressions. When the water, green and profound, sleeps beneath the rocks, its emerald eyes wear the treacherous look of a naiad who would charm the passer-by only to drown him; then, wanton that it is, leaps blindly between the rocks, turns its bed topsy-turvy, rises aloft in a tempest of foam, dashes itself impotently and furiously into spray against the bowlder that has vanquished it. Three steps further on, it subsides and goes frisking capriciously alongside the bank in changing eddies, braided with bands of light and shade, twisting voluptuously like an adder. When the rock of its bed is broad and smooth, it spreads out, veined with rose and azure, smilingly offering its level glass to the wholemass of the sunlight. Over the bending plants, it threads its silent way in lines straight and tense as in a bundle of rushes, and with the spring and swiftness of a flying trout. When it falls opposite the sun, the hues of the rainbow may be seen trembling in its crystal threads, vanishing, reappearing, an aerial work, a sylph of light, alongside which a bee’s wine would seem coarse, and which fairy fingers would in vain strive to equal.
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Seen in the distance, the whole Gave is only a storm of silvered falls, intersected by splendid blue expanses. Fiery and joyful youth, useless and full of poetry; to-morrow that troubled wave will receive the filthof cities, and quays of stone will imprison its course by way of regulation.
At the bottom of an ice-cold gorge rolls the cascade of Larresecq. It does not deserve its renown: it is a sort of dilapidated stairway with a dirty stream, lost among stones and shifting earth, awkwardly scrambling down it; but, in getting there, you pass by a profound steep-edged hollow, where the torrent rolls along swallowed up in the caverns it has scooped out, obstructed by the trunks of the trees that it uproots. Overhead, lordly oaks meet in arcades; the shrubs steep their roots far below in the turbulent stream. No sunlight penetrates into this dark ravine; the Gave pierces its way through, unseen and icy. At the outlet where it streams forth, you hear its hoarse outcry; it is struggling among the rocks that choke it: one might fancy-it a bull stricken by the pangs of death.
This valley is solitary and out of the world; it is without culture; no tourists, not even herdsmen are to be found; three or four cows, perhaps, are there, busily cropping the herbage. Other gorges at the sides of the road and in the mountain of Gourzy are still wilder. There the faint trace of anancient pathway may with difficulty be made out.
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Can anything be sweeter than the certainty of being alone? In any widely known spot, you are in constant dread of an incursion of tourists; the hallooing of guides, the loud-voiced admiration, the bustle, whether of fastening horses, or of unpacking provisions, or of airing opinions, all disturb the budding sensation; civilization recovers its holdupon you. But here, what security and what silence! nothing that recalls man; the landscape is just what it has been these six thousand years: the grass grows useless and free as on the first day; no birds among the branches; only now and then may be heard the far-off cry of a soaring hawk. Here and there the face of a huge, projecting rock patches with a dark shade the uniform plane of the trees: it is a virgin wilderness in its severe beauty. The soul fancies that it recognizes unknown friends of long ago; the forms and colors are in secret harmony with it; when it finds these pure, and that it enjoys them unmixed with outside thought, it feels that it is entering into its inmost and calmest depth—a sensation so simple, after the tumult of our ordinary thoughts, is like the gentle murmur of an Æolian harp after the hubbub of a ball.
Going down the Valentin, on the slope of theMontagne Verte, I found landscapes less austere. You reach the right bank of the Gave d’Ossau. A pretty streamlet slips down the mountain, encased between two walls of rounded stones all purple with poppies and wild mallows. Its fall has been turned to account in driving rowsof saws incessantly back and forth over blocks of marble. A tall, bare-footed girl, in rags, ladles up sand and water for wetting the machine; by the aid of the sand the iron blade eats away the block.
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A foot-path follows the river bank, lined with houses, huge oaks and fields of Indian corn; on the other side is an arid reach of pebbly shore, where children are paddling near some hogsasleep in the sand; on the transparent wave, flocks of ducks rock with the undulations of the current: it is the country and culture after solitude and the desert. The pathway winds through a plantation of osiers and willows; the long, waving stalks that love the rivers, the pale pendent foliage, are infinitely graceful to eyes accustomed to the intense green of the mountains. On the right may be seen the narrow rocky ways that lead to the hamlets scattered over the slopes. The houses there lean their backs against the mountain, shelved one above another, so as to look down upon the valley. At noon the people are all absent. Every door is closed; three or four old women, who alone are left in the village, are spreading grain upon the level rock which forms the street or esplanade. What more singular than this long, natural flag-stone, carpeted with gilded heads of grain. The dark and narrow church ordinarily rises from a terraced yard, enclosed by a low wall; the bell-tower is white and square, with a slated spire. Under the porch may be read a few epitaphs carved in the stone; these, for the most part, are the names of invalids who have died at Eaux Bonnes; I remarked those of two brothers. To die so far from home and alone! It is touching to read these words of sympathy graven upon a tomb; this sunlight is so sweet! thevalley so beautiful! you seem to breathe health in the air; you want to live; one wishes, as the old poet says, “Se réjouir longtemps de sa force et de sa jeunesse.” The love of life is imparted with the love of light. How often, beneath the gloomy northern sky, do we form a similar desire?
At the turn of the mountain is the entrance into an oak wood that rises on one of the declivities. These lofty, roomy forests give to the south shade without coolness. High up, among the trunks, shines a patch of blue sky; light and shade dapple the gray moss like a silken design upon a velvet ground. A heavy, warm air, loaded with vegetable emanations, rises to the face; it fills the chest and affects the head like wine. The monotonous sound of the cricket and the grasshopper comes from wheat-land and meadow, from mountain and from plain; you feel that living myriads are at work among the heather and under the thatch; and in the veins, where ferments the blood, courses a vague sensation of comfort, the uncertain state between sleeping and dreaming, which steeps the soul in animal life and stifles thought under the dull impressions of the senses. You stretch yourself out, and are content with merely living; you feel not the passage of the hours, but are happy in the present moment, without a thought for past or future; you gaze uponthe slender sprigs of moss, the grayish spikes of the grasses, the long ribands of the shining herbs; you follow the course of an insect striving to get over a thicket of turf, and clambering up and down in the labyrinth of its stalks. Why not confess that you have become a child again and are amused with the least of sights? What is the country but a means of returning to our earliest youth, of finding again that faculty of happiness, that state of deep attention, that indifference to everything but pleasure and the present sensation, that facile joy which is a brimming spring ready to overflow at the least impulse? I passed an hour beside a squadron of ants who were dragging the body of a big fly across a stone. They were bent upon the dismemberment of the vanquished; at each leg a little workwoman, in a black bodice, pulled and worked with all her might; the rest held the body in place. I never saw efforts more fearful; at times their prey rolled off the stone; then they had to begin over again. At last, fatigued by the toils of war, and wanting power to cut up and carry off the prey, they resigned themselves to eating it on the spot.
The view from Mount Gourzy is much admired; the traveller is informed that he will see the whole plain of Beam as far as Pau. I am obliged to take the word of the guide-book for it; I found clouds at the summit and saw nothing but the fog. At the end of the forest that covers the first slope lay some enormous trees, half rotten, and already whitened with moss. Some mummies of pine trees were left standing; but their pyramids of branches showed a shattered side. Old oaks split open as high up as a man’s head, crowned their wound with mushrooms and red strawberries. From the manner in which the ground is strewn it might be called a battle-field laid waste by bullets; it is the herdsmen who, for mere amusement, set fire to the trees.
My neighbor, the tourist, told me next day that I had not lost much, and gave me a dissertation against the views from mountain-tops. He is a resolute traveller, a great lover of painting, very odd, however, and accustomed to believing nothing but himself, enthusiastic reasoner, violent in his opinions and fruitful in paradox. He is a singular man; at fifty, he is as active as if he were but twenty. He is dry, nervous, always well and alert, his legsforever in motion, his head fermenting with some idea which has just sprung up in his brain and which during two days will appear to him the finest in the world. He is always under way and a hundred paces ahead of others, seeking truth with rash boldness, even to loving danger, finding pleasure in contradicting and being contradicted, and now and then deceived by his militant and adventurous spirit. He has nothing to hamper him; neither wife, children, place nor ambition. I like him, notwithstanding his want of moderation, because he is sincere; bit by bit he has told me his life, and I have found out his tastes; his name is Paul, and he was left, at the age of twenty, without parents and with an income of twelve thousand francs.