Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/415

THE AMERICAN they served together in the Pontifical Zouaves. M. Ledoux was the nephew of a distinguished Ultramontane bishop. At last he came in with an effect of dress in which an ingenious attempt at adjustment at once to a confirmed style and to the peculiar situation was visible, and with a gravity tempered by a decent deference to the best breakfast the Croix Helvétique had ever set forth. Valentin's servant, who was allowed but with restrictions the honour of attending his master, had been lending a light Parisian hand in the kitchen. The two Frenchmen did their best to prove that if circumstances might overshadow they could n't really obscure the national gift for good talk, and M. Ledoux delivered a neat little eulogy on poor Bellegarde, whom he pronounced the most charming Englishman he had ever known.

"Do you call him an Englishman?" Newman asked.

M. Ledoux smiled a moment and then just fell short of an epigram: "C'est plus qu'un Anglais, le cher homme—c'est un Anglomane!" Newman returned, sturdily and handsomely, that any country might have been proud to claim him, and M. de Grosjoyaux remarked that it was really too soon to deliver a funeral oration on poor Bellegarde. "Evidently," said M. Ledoux. "But I could n't help observing this morning to Mr. Newman that when a man has taken such excellent measures for his salvation as our dear friend did last evening, it seems almost a pity he should put it in peril again by coming back to the world." M. Ledoux was a great 385