"You frequent that society, and the Count permits it?"

"Yes; better the Imperialists than the Republicans; and my father begins
to own that truth, though he is too old or too indolent to act on it."

"And Raoul?"

"Oh, Raoul, the melancholy and philosophical Raoul, has no ambition of
any kind, so long as--thanks somewhat to me--his purse is always
replenished for the wants of his stately existence, among the foremost of
which wants are the means to supply the wants of others. That is the
true reason why he consents to our glove-shop. Raoul belongs, with some
other young men of the Faubourg, to a society enrolled under the name of
Saint Francois de Sales, for the relief of the poor. He visits their
houses, and is at home by their sickbeds as at their stinted boards. Nor
does he confine his visitations to the limits of our Faubourg; he extends
his travels to Montmartre and Belleville. As to our upper world, he does
not concern himself much with its changes. He says that we have
destroyed too much ever to rebuild solidly; and that whatever we do build
could be upset any day by a Paris mob, which he declares to be the only
institution we have left. A wonderful fellow is Raoul,--full of mind,
though he does little with it; full of heart, which he devotes to
suffering humanity, and to a poetic, knightly reverence (not to be
confounded with earthly love, and not to be degraded into that sickly
sentiment called Platonic affection) for the Comtesse di Rimini, who is
six years older than himself, and who is very faithfully attached to her
husband, Raoul's intimate friend, whose honour he would guard as his own.
It is an episode in the drama of Parisian life, and one not so uncommon
as the malignant may suppose. Di Rimini knows and approves of his
veneration; my mother, the best of women, sanctions it, and deems truly