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to show off the character of his face (Greek, according to himself, despite his sweeping whiskers), M. de Norpois, while anything was being expounded to him, would preserve a facial immobility as absolute as if you had been addressing some ancient—and deaf—bust in a museum. Until suddenly, falling upon you like an auctioneer’s hammer or a Delphic oracle, the Ambassador’s voice, as he replied to you, would be all the more striking in that nothing in his face had allowed you to guess what sort of impression you had made on him, or what opinion he was about to express.
    “Precisely,” he suddenly began, as though the case were now heard and judged, after having allowed me to stammer incoherently beneath those motionless eyes which never for an instant left my face; “a friend of mine has a son whose case,
mutatis mutandis
, is very much like yours.” He adopted in speaking of our common predisposition the same reassuring tone as if it had been a predisposition not for literature but for rheumatism, and he had wished to assure me that it would not necessarily prove fatal. “He too chose to leave the Quai d’Orsay, although the way had been paved for him there by his father, and without caring what people might say, he settled down to write. And certainly, he’s had no reason to regret it. He published two years ago—of course, he’s much older than you—a book about the Sense of the Infinite on the western shore of Lake Victoria Nyanza, and this year he has brought out a short treatise, less weighty but written with a lively, not to say cutting pen, on the Repeating Rifle in the Bulgarian Army; and these have put him quite in a class by himself. He’s already gone pretty far, and he’s not the sort of man to stop halfway. I happen to know that (without any suggestion, of course, of his standing for election) his name has been mentioned several times in conversation, and not at all unfavourably, at the Academy of Moral Sciences. And so, though one can’t say yet, of course, that he’s exactly at the pinnacle, he has fought his way by sheer merit to a very fine position indeed, and success—which doesn’t always come only to the pushers and the muddlers, the fusspots who are generally show-offs—success has crowned his efforts.”
    My father, seeing me already, in a few years’ time, an Academician, exuded a satisfaction which M. de Norpois raised to the highest pitch when, after a momentary hesitation during which he appeared to be calculating the possible consequences of his act, he handed me his card and said: “Why not go and see him yourself? Tell him I sent you. He may be able to give you some good advice,” plunging me by these words into as painful a state of anxiety as if he had told me that I was to embark next day as cabin-boy on board a wind-jammer.
    My aunt Léonie had bequeathed to me, together with a multiplicity of objects and furniture which were something of an embarrassment, almost all her liquid assets—revealing thus after her death an affection for me which I had little suspected in her lifetime. My father, who was trustee of this estate until I came of age, now consulted M. de Norpois with regard to a number of investments. He recommended certain stocks bearing a low rate of interest, which he considered particularly sound, notably English consols and Russian four per cents. “With absolutely first-class securities such as those,” said M. de Norpois, “even if your income from them is nothing very great, you may be certain of never losing any of your capital.” My father then gave him a rough indication of what else he had bought. M. de Norpois gave a just perceptible smile of congratulation; like all capitalists, he regarded wealth as an enviable thing, but thought it more delicate to compliment people upon their possessions only by an inconspicuous sign of intelligent sympathy; at the same time, as he was himself colossally rich, he thought it in good taste to seem to regard