"The aspirant to the hand of Mademoiselle de Clairvaut," he said to himself, "without a single footboy to hold his horse! That may be in the present instance policy rather than any thing else, my good Lord Duke. But still we may learn wisdom, even, from such bitter words as those. I had forgotten how much all men value the gilded exterior. But it shall be so no longer. This that I aim at must be soon lost or won. I have staked life upon the pursuit, and all that makes life valuable. And why should I not stake fortune also? 'Fortune buys fortune,' says the old adage; and as the stake is great, so shall my game be bold." His resolution was instantly taken. He possessed, as we have said before, sufficient wealth to give him competence, and to enable him to mingle with decent splendour in the society in which he was born. But he calculated that the same fortune which put him at ease for life, might afford him the means of magnificence and display, if he resolved to expend the whole within a few years. He did so resolve, saying to himself, "I shall either be at the height of fortune and enjoyment ere two years be over, or I shall be no more. It suits me not to go on playing stake after stake, as many men do, beaten, like a tennis-ball, from prosperity to ruin, and from ruin to prosperity. I have bent myself to one great purpose, and I will attain it or die. That is always within one's power, to shake off life when it is no longer a source of happiness." As he thus thought, his horse slowly descended a gentle hill by the side of the river, with a meadow down to the Charente on the one side, and a bank crowned with the wall of a vineyard on the other. Built up against the wall was a little shrine, with a virgin and child behind a net-work of iron, and the votive offering of a silver lamp burning below. Sitting on the little green spot which topped the bank at that place--after having apparently said his prayers at the foot of the shrine--was a boy of about thirteen or fourteen years of age; and as the Abbé came slowly near, the youth took a pipe out of his pocket and began playing a wild plaintive Italian air, full of rich melody and deep feeling. The music was not new to the Abbé; he had heard it before in other lands, when the few pure feelings of the heart which he had ever possessed had not been crushed, like accidental flowers blossoming on a footpath, by the passing to and fro of other coarser things.