jealousy more dexterous than Othello's? Did he live with some woman
unworthy of him? One morning, on returning from I have forgotten what
shop, where I had just paid a bill, between the Church of Saint-Paul
and the Hotel de Ville, I came across Comte Octave in such eager
conversation with an old woman that he did not see me. The appearance
of this hag filled me with strange suspicions, suspicions that were
all the better founded because I never found that the Count invested
his savings. Is it not shocking to think of? I was constituting myself
my patron's censor. At that time I knew that he had more than six
hundred thousand francs to invest; and if he had bought securities of
any kind, his confidence in me was so complete in all that concerned
his pecuniary interests, that I certainly should have known it.

"Sometimes, in the morning, the Count took exercise in his garden, to
and fro, like a man to whom a walk is the hippogryph ridden by dreamy
melancholy. He walked and walked! And he rubbed his hands enough to
rub the skin off. And then, if I met him unexpectedly as he came to
the angle of a path, I saw his face beaming. His eyes, instead of the
hardness of a turquoise, had that velvety softness of the blue
periwinkle, which had so much struck me on the occasion of my first
visit, by reason of the astonishing contrast in the two different
looks; the look of a happy man, and the look of an unhappy man. Two or
three times at such a moment he had taken me by the arm and led me on;
then he had said, 'What have you come to ask?' instead of pouring out
his joy into my heart that opened to him. But more often, especially
since I could do his work for him and write his reports, the unhappy
man would sit for hours staring at the goldfish that swarmed in a
handsome marble basin in the middle of the garden, round which grew an
amphitheatre of the finest flowers. He, an accomplished statesman,
seemed to have succeeded in making a passion of the mechanical