gave it to me to the full. And I have been invited to sit in
more than one tall, dark house of the old town at their

hospitable board, had the bouillabaisse ladled out into a thick
plate by their high-voiced, broad-browed wives, talked to their

daughters--thick-set girls, with pure profiles, glorious masses
of black hair arranged with complicated art, dark eyes, and

dazzlingly white teeth.
I had also other acquaintances of quite a different sort. One of

them, Madame Delestang, an imperious, handsome lady in a
statuesque style, would carry me off now and then on the front

seat of her carriage to the Prado, at the hour of fashionable
airing. She belonged to one of the old aristocratic families in

the south. In her haughtyweariness she used to make me think of
Lady Dedlock in Dickens's "Bleak House," a work of the master for

which I have such an admiration, or rather such an intense and
unreasoning affection, dating from the days of my childhood, that

its very weaknesses are more precious to me than the strength of
other men's work. I have read it innumerable times, both in

Polish and in English; I have read it only the other day, and, by
a not very surprising inversion, the Lady Dedlock of the book

reminded me strongly of the "belle Madame Delestang."
Her husband (as I sat facing them both), with his thin, bony nose

and a perfectly bloodless, narrow physiognomy clamped together,
as it were, by short, formal side whiskers, had nothing of Sir

Leicester Dedlock's "grand air" and courtly solemnity. He
belonged to the haute bourgeoisie only, and was a banker, with

whom a modest credit had been opened for my needs. He was such
an ardent--no, such a frozen-up, mummified Royalist that he used

in current conversation turns of speech contemporary, I should
say, with the good Henri Quatre; and when talking of money

matters, reckoned not in francs, like the common, godless herd of
post-Revolutionary Frenchmen, but in obsolete and forgotten

ecus--ecus of all money units in the world!--as though Louis
Quatorze were still promenading in royal splendour the gardens of

Versailles, and Monsieur de Colbert busy with the direction of
maritime affairs. You must admit that in a banker of the

nineteenth century it was a quaint idiosyncrasy. Luckily, in the
counting-house (it occupied part of the ground floor of the

Delestang town residence, in a silent, shady street) the accounts
were kept in modern money, so that I never had any difficulty in

making my wants known to the grave, low-voiced, decorous,
Legitimist (I suppose) clerks, sitting in the perpetual gloom of

heavily barred windows behind the sombre, ancient counters,
beneath lofty ceilings with heavily molded cornices. I always

felt, on going out, as though I had been in the temple of some
very dignified but completely temporal religion. And it was

generally on these occasions that under the great carriage
gateway Lady Ded--I mean Madame Delestang--catching sight of my

raised hat, would beckon me with an amiableimperiousness to the
side of the carriage, and suggest with an air of amused

nonchalance, "Venez donc faire un tour avec nous," to which the
husband would add an encouraging "C'est ca. Allons, montez,

jeune homme." He questioned me some times, significantly but
with perfect tact and delicacy, as to the way I employed my time,

and never failed to express the hope that I wrote regularly to my
"honoured uncle." I made no secret of the way I employed my

time, and I rather fancy that my artless tales of the pilots and
so on entertained Madame Delestang so far as that ineffable woman

could be entertained by the prattle of a youngster very full of
his new experience among strange men and strange sensations. She

expressed no opinions, and talked to me very little; yet her
portrait hangs in the gallery of my intimate memories, fixed

there by a short and fleetingepisode. One day, after putting me
down at the corner of a street, she offered me her hand, and

detained me, by a slight pressure, for a moment. While the
husband sat motionless and looking straight before him, she

leaned forward in the carriage to say, with just a shade of
warning in her leisurely tone: "Il faut, cependant, faire

attention a ne pas gater sa vie." I had never seen her face so
close to mine before. She made my heart beat and caused me to

remain thoughtful for a whole evening. Certainly one must, after
all, take care not to spoil one's life. But she did not know--

nobody could know--how impossible that danger seemed to me.
VII

Can the transports of first love be calmed, checked, turned to a
cold suspicion of the future by a grave quotation from a work on

political economy? I ask--is it conceivable? Is it possible?
Would it be right? With my feet on the very shores of the sea

and about to embrace my blue-eyed dream, what could a
good-natured warning as to spoiling one's life mean to my

youthful passion? It was the most unexpected and the last, too,
of the many warnings I had received. It sounded to me very

bizarre--and, uttered as it was in the very presence of my
enchantress, like the voice of folly, the voice of ignorance.

But I was not so callous or so stupid as not to recognize there
also the voice of kindness. And then the vagueness of the

warning--because what can be the meaning of the phrase: to spoil
one's life?--arrested one's attention by its air of wise

profundity. At any rate, as I have said before, the words of la
belle Madame Delestang made me thoughtful for a whole evening. I

tried to understand and tried in vain, not having any notion of
life as an enterprise that could be mi managed. But I left off

being thoughtfulshortly before midnight, at which hour, haunted
by no ghosts of the past and by no visions of the future, I

walked down the quay of the Vieux Port to join the pilot-boat of
my friends. I knew where she would be waiting for her crew, in

the little bit of a canal behind the fort at the entrance of the
harbour. The deserted quays looked very white and dry in the

moonlight, and as if frostbound in the sharp air of that December
night. A prowler or two slunk by noiselessly; a custom-house

guard, soldier-like, a sword by his side, paced close under the
bowsprits of the long row of ships moored bows on opposite the

long, slightly curved, continuous flat wall of the tall houses
that seemed to be one immenseabandoned building with innumerable

windows shuttered closely. Only here and there a small, dingy
cafe for sailors cast a yellow gleam on the bluish sheen of the

flagstones. Passing by, one heard a deep murmur of voices
inside--nothing more. How quiet everything was at the end of the

quays on the last night on which I went out for a service cruise
as a guest of the Marseilles pilots! Not a footstep, except my

own, not a sigh, not a whispering echo of the usual revelry going
on in the narrow, unspeakable lanes of the Old Town reached my

ear--and suddenly, with a terrific jingling rattle of iron and
glass, the omnibus of the Jolliette on its last journey swung

around the corner of the dead wall which faces across the paved
road the characteristic angular mass of the Fort St. Jean. Three

horses trotted abreast, with the clatter of hoofs on the granite
setts, and the yellow, uproarious machine jolted violently behind

them, fantastic, lighted up, perfectly empty, and with the driver
apparently asleep on his swaying perch above that amazing racket.

I flattened myself against the wall and gasped. It was a stunning
experience. Then after staggering on a few paces in the shadow

of the fort, casting a darkness more intense than that of a
clouded night upon the canal, I saw the tiny light of a lantern

standing on the quay, and became aware of muffled figures making
toward it from various directions. Pilots of the Third Company

hastening to embark. Too sleepy to be talkative, they step on
board in silence. But a few low grunts and an enormous yawn are

heard. Somebody even ejaculates: "Ah! Coquin de sort!" and sighs
wearily at his hard fate.

The patron of the Third Company (there were five companies of
pilots at that time, I believe) is the brother-in-law of my

friend Solary (Baptistin), a broad-shouldered, deep chested man
of forty, with a keen, frank glance which always seeks your eyes.

He greets me by a low, hearty "He, l'ami. Comment va?" With his
clipped mustache and massive open face, energetic and at the same

time placid in expression, he is a fine specimen of the
southerner of the calm type. For there is such a type in which