object of that feudal reverence, still surviving in the more unfrequented
parts of Bretagne, for the representatives of illustrious names connected
with the immemorial legends of the province.

The very bustle of a railway, with its crowd and quickness and
unceremonious democracy of travel, served to pain and confound and
humiliate that sense of individual dignity in which he had been nurtured.
He felt that, once away from Rochebriant, he was but a cipher in the sum
of human beings. Arrived at Paris, and reaching the gloomy hotel to
which he had been recommended, he greeted even the desolation of that
solitude which is usually so oppressive to a stranger in the metropolis
of his native land. Loneliness was better than the loss of self in the
reek and pressure of an unfamiliar throng. For the first few days he had
wandered over Paris without calling even on the 'avoue' to whom M. Hebert
had directed him. He felt with the instinctive acuteness of a mind
which, under sounder training, would have achieved no mean distinction,
that it was a safe precaution to imbue himself with the atmosphere of the
place, and seize on those general ideas which in great capitals are so
contagious that they are often more accurately caught by the first
impressions than by subsequent habit, before he brought his mind into
collision with those of the individuals he had practically to deal with.

At last he repaired to the 'avoue,' M. Gandrin, Rue St. Florentin. He
had mechanically formed his idea of the abode and person of an 'avoue'
from his association with M. Hebert. He expected to find a dull house in
a dull street near the centre of business, remote from the haunts of
idlers, and a grave man of unpretending exterior and matured years.

He arrived at a hotel newly fronted, richly decorated, in the fashionable
quartier close by the Tuileries. He entered a wide 'porte cochere,' and