"My excellent friend," he said to him, "the Moor is close upon thirty, and you have passed your fortieth year. You are still young enough to attract each other, and your ages are well balanced; but, without offence, you are no longer boy and girl, to leave blank pages in the book of your felicity! Make the most of the happy years that still remain. Marry. I will travel with Mario for a few months, and while we are absent I will tell him that I alone conceived the idea of a marriage of reason between Mercedes and you. I will invent some pretext to explain why you could not wait until our return, and when he sees you again, his mind will be accustomed to the new condition of affairs. Marriage always has a sobering effect, and then I trust to you to conceal the joys of the honeymoon behind the thick clouds of prudence and self-restraint." So it was that the marquis took Mario to Paris. He showed him the king and his court, but at a distance; for society had changed greatly in the fifteen years that worthy Sylvain had been living on his estates. The friends of his youth were dead, or had withdrawn, as he had, from the hurly-burly of the new society. The few great personages still on the stage with whom he had formerly had some acquaintance, hardly remembered him, and, except for his antiquated attire, would not have recognized him. Mario's attractive and modest manners were observed however: the _Beaux Messieurs_ were warmly welcomed in some houses of distinction, but no one suggested taking them any higher; and indeed neither of them desired very earnestly to approach the pale sun of Louis XIII. Mario was terribly disappointed when he saw the fainthearted son of Henri IV. ride by, and the marquis had discovered in that face no encouragement to pursue his design of obtaining the royal confirmation of his title of marquis. New edicts appeared every day against the usurpation of titles; edicts little respected, for the nobles, old and new, continued to assume names of domains of very doubtful authenticity. Their obscurity protected them. Bois-Doré was forced to recognize that he had no better refuge than that. Furthermore, he could not avoid the discovery that in Paris nobody was a _beau monsieur_ who was not of the court. To be sure, in their daily drives and on Place Royale, more or less people turned to gaze at the strange contrast between his painted face and Mario's deliciously fresh complexion; and for some time the goodman, thinking that he was recognized, smiled at the passers-by, and put his hand to his hat, ready to welcome overtures which no one thought of making. That gave him an air of dazed hesitancy and vulgar affability which aroused laughter. The ladies who sat under the young trees in the Cours-la-Reine, or walked back and forth fan in hand, said to one another: "Who is that tall old fool, pray?"