Troops of officers in full and half dress, orderlies with despatches, aides-de-camp in hot haste, came and went through that room for hours; and yet there I sat, unnoticed and unrecognized by any, till I began to feel in my isolation a sense of desertion and loneliness I had never known before. It was already evening when D'Artans joined me, and taking my arm familiarly within his own, said,-- “Come along, Jasper, and let us dine together.” The sound of my own name so overcame me that I could scarcely restrain my tears as I heard it. It was a memory of home and the past too touching to be resisted! CHAPTER XXVII. THE BATTLE OF THE SECTIONS There could not have been a readier process of disenchantment to me, as to all my boyish ambitions and hopes, than the routine of my daily life at this period. I was lodged, with some fourteen others, in an old Pension in the Rue des Augustines, adjoining the bureau in which we were employed. We repaired each morning at an early hour to our office, and never left it till late in the evening,--sometimes, indeed, to a late hour of the night. Neither the manners nor the habits of my companions inspired me with a desire to cultivate their intimacy. They were evidently of a low class by birth, and with tastes even inferior to their position. They construed my estrangement to the true cause, and did not scruple to show that I was not a favorite amongst them. In ridicule of my seeming pretensions, they called me the “Count,” and never passed me without an obsequious mock salutation, which I returned as punctiliously, and not appearing to detect its sarcasm. With experience of life and mankind, isolation is probably a condition not devoid of certain pleasures,--it may minister to a kind of proud self-reliance and independence of spirit; but to a boy it is one of unalloyed misery. There is no heavier infliction than the want of that free expansion of the heart that comes of early friendship. Youth is essentially the season of confidence; and to restrain its warm impulses, and dam up the flow of its affections, is to destroy its best and highest charm. I will not venture to assert that I was not myself much to blame for the seclusion in which I lived. I probably resented too forcibly what I need scarcely have noticed, and felt too acutely what, at worst, were but trifling annoyances. Some of this may be attributed to me constitutionally, but even more to the nature of my bringing up. All my boyish impulses were stimulated by affection; whatever I attempted was in a wish to gain praise; all my ambitions were to be loved the more. In my loneliness I sought out M. de Gabriac, but in vain. His lodging on the Place was now occupied by another, who could give no tidings of him whatever. I wrote to my mother and to Raper, but without receiving a reply. I then tried M. Jost, and received a few lines to say that my friends had taken their departure some months before from Reichenau, but in what direction he knew not.