Page:Georges Eekhoud - Escal Vigor, a novel.djvu/136

112 softened him. As regards his master, who had picked him up out of the dirt, in spite of a shady character and deplorable references, he nourished the envy, ill-will and rancour, of a beggar against a rich man, and of a common rascal against a well-born gentleman; a ferocious angriness disguised under the devil-may-carishness of a street arab. His disinterested airs masked an unbridled hankering after trivial luxuries, for temperaments of this stamp covet those purely physical sensations exclusively, which the possession of gold can alone procure. As for the intellectual pleasures which Kehlmark enjoyed, Landrillon held them as so many frivolities.

The Count permitted a great deal of latitude to this rascal. He smiled as Landrillon rattled off his doughty deeds as a frequenter of low lodging-houses and an explorer of garrets. But, where Landrillon showed himself particularly incomparable was in his out-breaks as a woman-hater, in his paradoxical and disparaging tirades against a sex, which all the same, if he was to be believed, had never been sparing in its favors to him.

Whilst they lived in town, Landrillon was not lodged in the Dowager's house, but above the stables situated at some distance