It was, indeed, the famous abbé, afterwards Cardinal de Retz, with whom I was then in conversation. Not yet three and twenty years of age, he had already acquired one of the most singular reputations that ever man possessed. Daring, intriguing, and ambitious, nothing daunted him in his enterprises, nothing repelled him in their course. Storms and tumults were his element; and when, before he was seventeen, he wrote his famous "_Conjuration de Fiesque_," he seemed to point out the scene in which he was himself destined to act, to which nature prompted him from the first, and circumstances called him in the end. In his manner, there was a strange mixture of calm suavity, thoughtless vivacity, policy, frankness, and pride, which, combined together, served perhaps better to cover his immediate motives, and hide his real character, than the appearance of any uniform habit of mind which he could have assumed. All men contain within themselves strange contradictions; but he was the only one I ever knew, who, upon the most mature reflection, acted in continual contradiction to himself. He would often put in practice the most consummate strokes of policy to gain a trifle, or to satisfy an appetite; and he would commit the most egregious follies and affect the most extravagant passions, to hide the shrewdest political schemes and conceal the best calculated and most subtle enterprises. He was a man on whom one could never calculate with certainty. It seemed his pleasure to disappoint whatever expectations had been formed of him; and yet, to hear him reason, one would have judged that the slightest action of his life was regulated by strong conclusions from fixed unvarying principles. I had heard his character from many others, as well as from the Marquis de St. Brie; but as this last gentleman had calculated, when he sketched it to me, that my life would be limited to three days at the utmost, he could have had no possible motive in deceiving me. With this knowledge of his character, then, it required no great discernment to see that the visit of De Retz was not without an object; and resolving, if it were possible, to ascertain precisely what that object was, I bowed on his announcing himself, and said, "Of course, Monsieur de Retz, it is needless for me to give you my name. You were certainly aware of that before you did me the honour of this visit." "No, indeed!" replied he; "I am perfectly ignorant both of your name and rank, though, by your appearance, and by all I have heard of you, I can have no doubt in regard to the latter. The truth is, I was informed by persons on whom I could depend, that a young gentleman of singularly prepossessing appearance and manners had taken this apartment, and was supposed to be under some temporary difficulty."