We should be seriously grieved if the expression _sage_ of which we made use at the end of the preceding chapter should lead the too credulous reader into a dangerous error. The tendency of this edifying history is to prove, on the contrary, in the most simple and incontrovertible manner, that however man may subdue his passions and limit his enjoyments to the rigorous circle traced by fortune, it is sufficient that these passions exist, and that he is their slave, to disturb the most philosophical mind, and to excite tempests that are the more violent because concentrated in a narrow space. Of what import are the dimensions of the scene? A perturbation in a glass of water is a tempest full of horror to the fly who ventures to brave its dangers. Well, the worthy Major Anspach was this imprudent insect. One fine day in April, when the air was soft and balmy, the descendant by the female line of the last Dukes of Lorraine, having brushed with the greatest care his long brown overcoat and his black plush pantaloons, sought, at his usual stately pace, his favorite resting-place, and its perfumes. The frequenters of “Provence in Miniature,” as that end of the garden is called. Children, nurses, young men and girls, were so well acquainted with the “man of the bench,” that no one was permitted to usurp the seat which so long possession had consecrated to his use; what, then, was the painful surprise of the major on approaching his domain to find it occupied! His first impulse was to take the affair in the simplest form of view, to go up and explain to the audacious invader of his privileges by what a continuous occupation he, Major Anspach, Baron of Phalsbourg, descended in the female line from the last Dukes of Lorraine, had acquired the exclusive right to sit in that angle of the wall, between the jasmine and the flowering roses. But the necessity he would be under of divulging his birth was repugnant to his pride; and as the individual occupying the bench—_his_ bench—was an old man like himself; long like himself, thin and unhappy like himself, and who appeared, like himself, not to enjoy many of the luxuries of life, and whose face, like his own, bore traces of long suffering, and painful struggles with adversity; our worthy major contented himself by throwing upon the unknown the glance of an old lion—who on returning to his den and finding it occupied by another old lion dying, passes on—so our major. “It assuredly is only a temporary occupant,” said he mentally—“a walk to the end of the avenue and he will have departed.”