Germain left Dubourg alone; whereupon he stretched himself out in a luxurious easy-chair and tossed away the book he had taken up.

"To the devil with reading!" he said, assuming the position best adapted for a nap; "it's high time for me to rest; I have earned it. Dance, dance away! How comfortable it is in this chair, especially when one has been within an ace of sleeping in the street! Here am I installed under the roof of Monsieur le Comte de Montreville, a most respectable gentleman, who has at least thirty thousand francs a year, and just one son, whose friend I am, and whose education I aspire to finish; for they have stuffed a heap of rubbish into his head, and have neglected to teach him the most essential thing of all—knowledge of the human heart, and especially of the female heart. As I am decidedly well posted in that branch of knowledge, I propose to make something of our dear Frédéric, and to teach him to know the world; so that he may make his way, like me."

While he thus communed with himself, Dubourg began to nod, and before he had been in the easy-chair five minutes he was sleeping soundly.

II
THE COMTE DE MONTREVILLE.—AN EVENING PARTY IN SOCIETY

The Comte de Montreville was, at the time that we make his acquaintance, about sixty years old. The scion of a noble and wealthy family, he had served in the army, married, and retired from service, and had succeeded in coming safely through the tempests of the Revolution.

He was a short, slender man, with a cold, stern face which commanded respect. He did not lack intelligence, nor was he the slave of a mass of absurd prejudices of the sort that some old men were trying to make fashionable, like paniers and curly wigs. Monsieur de Montreville was not one of those men who insist on retrograding while others go forward; he followed the general current of the time, and, wise amid a multitude of fools, he blamed only those who, from a proneness to exaggeration, from selfishness, or from incapacity, muddied the waters of a stream which all the efforts of all mankind could not prevent from flowing.

But the count had been brought up strictly by his father. Accustomed early in life to unquestioning obedience, he desired his son to be no less submissive to him. At the age of six, young Frédéric lost his mother. The count did not choose to marry again; he had a son to inherit his name, and that was enough for him. He placed Frédéric at one of the best schools in Paris. At fourteen, the young count, who was endowed with an unusually fine intellect, had carried off several prizes. His education was not then completed; but his father, fearing that at that age he might form some dangerous intimacy, and impelled by his longing to have him always by his side, in order to accustom him to absolute obedience, took him away from the school, and gave him a private tutor.

This tutor, in whose charge the count placed his son, and with whom we shall soon become very well acquainted, was neither a scholar nor a man of brains; far from it. But he was entirely at the orders of monsieur le comte, and would not have taken his pupil out to walk without first asking the father's permission; that was the reason for his selection, despite his limited mental qualifications.

The count was very fond of his son, but he would have been very sorry to allow the full depth of his affection to appear; he would have considered that he had forfeited his dignity and his claim to Frédéric's respect if he had spoken to him in the kindly tone of a dear friend. But is not our father the first friend that nature gives us? and ought the respect we owe him to banish confidence and intimacy?

Frédéric loved his father, but he trembled before him. Accustomed from childhood never to reply to him, and to obey promptly his lightest word, he had retained, as he grew to manhood, that habit of passive obedience and that timidity which made it impossible for him to allow his heart to speak freely in his father's presence.