"This is not a conference; is it not so? You no longer believe that it is a comedy? I loved Rovère. Life had often separated us. He searched for fortune at the other end of the world. I made a mess of mine and ate it in Paris. But we always kept up our relations, and when he returned to France we were happy in again seeing each other. The grayer turned the hair, the more tender the heart became. I had always found him morose--from his twentieth year he always dragged after him a sinister companion--ennui. He had chosen a Consular career, to live far away, and in a fashion not at all like ours. I have often laughingly said to him that he probably had met with unrequited love; that he had experienced some unhappy passion. He said, no! I feigned to believe it. One is not sombre and melancholy like that without some secret grief. After all, there are others who do not feel any gayer with a smile on the lips. Sadness is no sign. Neither is gayety!" His face took on a weary, melancholy expression, which at first astonished the Magistrate; then he experienced a feeling of pity; he listened, silent and grave. "I will pass over all the details of our life, shall I not? My monologue would be too long. The years of youth passed with a rapidity truly astonishing; we come to the time when we found ourselves--he weary of life, established in his chosen apartments in the Boulevard de Clichy, with his paintings and books; sitting in front of his fire and awaiting death--I continuing to spur myself on like a foundered horse. Rovère moralized to me; I jeered at his sermons, and I went to sit by his fireside and talk over the past. One of his joys had been this portrait of me, painted by Paul Baudry. He had hung it up in his salon, at the corner of the chimney piece, at the left, and he often said to me: "'Dost thou know that when thou art not here I talk to it?' "I was not there very often. Parisian life draws us by its thousand attractions. The days which seem interminable when one is twenty rush by as if on wings when one is fifty. One has not even time to stop to see the friends one loves. At the last moment, if one is right, one ought to say, 'How I have cast to the winds everything precious which life has given me. How foolish I have been--how stupid.' Pay no attention to my philosophisms--the cell! Mazas forces one to think!