Then the opiate closed its lid on me, and I did not even hear the departure of the Vicomte Armand de Chatellan, my future guardian, who shuffled out of the unpleasant business of grieving my heart on the same evening that he shuffled into my life, he and his grand, queer, quaint, and sometimes despicable personality, perfumed with vervain and the cigars of the Café de Paris. PART II CHAPTER XVII A DÉJEÛNER AT THE CAFÉ DE PARIS The death of my father cast me into an entirely new life. Anyone less fitting than the Vicomte Armand de Chatellan to be the guardian of a child of nine it would be hard to imagine at first sight. But my father was no fool. This gorgeous old night-moth of the Second Empire, this frequenter of Tortoni's and the Café de Paris--always hard up, with an income of two hundred thousand francs a year--was a man of rigid honour in his way. Left sole and irresponsible guardian of me and my money, he shuffled out of his difficulties and bothers by placing the latter in the funds and the former in the Bourdaloue College--that same college of the Jesuit fathers where the Comte de Coigny was receiving his education. Here nine years of my life were spent--nine dull but not unhappy years. Lame and unfit for the army, completely cut off from the only profession fit for a gentleman--to use the Vicomte's expression--I saw the others go off to join the Military College, and I would not have felt it so bitterly had not De Coigny been amongst them. He was my natural enemy. All the time we spent together at the Bourdaloue, we scarcely spoke a word one to the other. Speechless enmity: there can scarcely be a worse condition between boys or men. Once a month or so the Vicomte came to see me. Joubert came often. He was installed as caretaker in the Château de Saluce, and he would bring me presents of game and plovers' eggs, huge Jaronel pears from the orchard, and cakes baked by Fauchard's wife. During the first few months at the college, I had got leave from the Father Superior to visit the Felicianis. A young priest accompanied me. But the Felicianis were not at the Hôtel de Mayence; no one knew anything about them; the hotel itself had changed hands after the fashion of these small hotels, the short chapters of whose histories have for heading "Bankruptcy." Then I forgot. Little by little the beautiful Countess and the sprightly Eloise faded from my mind. Never entirely, but they passed to the region of ghosts, the limbo of things half remembered. I was not a diligent student. Good for nothing much except drawing. I was an artist born, I believe, and had the artistic temperament, which takes a delight in all things brilliant and beautiful, and tuneful and grand, and holds in abhorrence all things dull and most things useful. Smuggled novels and the poems of De Musset were the literature of my heart. D'Artagnan and Bussey were my heroes, and Esmeralda, that brilliant and gemlike creation, was my mistress.