"He has only been back for the last month," said M. de Cernay; "but you must be aware of the way he decided on that voyage. You may perhaps know that Falmouth always goes to bed at six in the morning. Well, one day, about eighteen months ago, he waked up about four o'clock in the afternoon; he had slept very badly, was restless, excited, nervous; besides, he had just been winning enormous sums at play, and so was deprived of those feelings of interest which sometimes awaked him from the lethargy of his colourless life; the fact is, he was more than usually bored to death. He calls his _valet de chambre_ and asks him what the weather is like. The weather was gloomy, dismal, foggy. 'Ah, this everlasting fog! Never a ray of sunshine!' says Falmouth, yawning fearfully; then in his coolest way he adds, 'Send for the horses.' The horses arrive, his travelling carriage is always in readiness; they harness the horses; his _valet de chambre_, who is accustomed to his master's ways, packs up the trunks, and two hours afterwards my lord came down-stairs and said to his hall porter, 'If any one asks for me you can say I have gone--'and he hesitated a moment between Constantinople and Calcutta. Finally deciding for the latter, he said, with a yawn, 'Gone to Calcutta.' In fact he had gone there, and there he remained for three months, and now he comes back as imperturbable as ever, as if he had simply gone off to Baden and back again." "Lord Falmouth is an extremely distinguished man?" said I to the count. "He has a great deal of _esprit_ and of the best kind," he answered me, "a prodigious amount of learning, and a no less marvellous practical experience of men and things, having travelled in the four quarters of the globe, and seen all the courts of Europe as only an English peer can visit them. Son of one of the greatest lords in the three kingdoms, he possesses five or six hundred thousand francs of revenue in his own right; and yet, with all this, Falmouth is the only really blasé and bored man that I know of, he has exhausted everything, nothing amuses him any more." "And M. du Pluvier," said I to M. de Cernay, "what is he like?"