Madame de Ventadour rode on horseback, and Maltravers was one of her
usual companions. And oh, the beautiful landscapes through which their
daily excursions lay!

Maltravers was an admirable scholar. The stores of the immortal dead
were as familiar to him as his own language. The poetry, the
philosophy, the manner of thought and habits of life--of the graceful
Greek and the luxurious Roman--were a part of knowledge that constituted
a common and household portion of his own associations and peculiarities
of thought. He had saturated his intellect with the Pactolus of
old--and the grains of gold came down from the classic Tmolus with every
tide. This knowledge of the dead, often so useless, has an
inexpressible charm when it is applied to the places where the dead
lived. We care nothing about the ancients on Highgate Hill--but at
Baiae, Pompeii, by the Virgilian Hades, the ancients are society with
which we thirst to be familiar. To the animated and curious Frenchwoman
what a cicerone was Ernest Maltravers! How eagerly she listened to
accounts of a life more elegant than that of Paris!--of a civilisation
which the world never can know again! So much the better;--for it was
rotten at the core, though most brilliant in the complexion. Those cold
names and unsubstantial shadows which Madame de Ventadour had been
accustomed to yawn over in skeleton histories, took from the eloquence
of Maltravers the breath of life--they glowed and moved--they feasted
and made love--were wise and foolish, merry and sad, like living things.
On the other hand, Maltravers learned a thousand new secrets of the
existing and actual world from the lips of the accomplished and
observant Valerie. What a new step in the philosophy of life does a
young man of genius make, when he first compares his theories and
experience with the intellect of a clever woman of the world! Perhaps
it does not elevate him, but how it enlightens and refines!--what