Well, simply because I am fond of him (we are known as the inseparables—_Arcades ambo_), simply because I know the immense service that he can still render to his country, the reefs from which he can steer her if he remains at the helm; out of affection, out of high regard for him, out of patriotism, I should not vote for him. I fancy, moreover, that I have given him to understand that I should not.” (I seemed to discern in his eyes the stern Assyrian profile of Leroy-Beaulieu.) “So that to give him my vote now would be a sort of recantation on my part.” M. de Norpois repeatedly dismissed his brother Academicians as old fossils. Other reasons apart, every member of a club or academy likes to ascribe to his fellow members the type of character that is the direct converse of his own, less for the advantage of being able to say: “Ah! If it only rested with me!” than for the satisfaction of making the election which he himself has managed to secure seem more difficult, a greater distinction. “I may tell you,” he concluded, “that in the best interests of you all, I should prefer to see your father triumphantly elected in ten or fifteen years’ time.” Words which I assumed to have been dictated if not by jealousy, at any rate by an utter lack of any willingness to oblige, and which later on I was to recall when the course of events had given them a different meaning. “You haven’t thought of giving the Institute an address on the price of bread during the Fronde, I suppose,” the historian of that movement timidly inquired of M. de Norpois. “You could make a considerable success of a subject like that,” (which was to say, “you would give me a colossal advertisement,”) he added, smiling at the Ambassador pusillanimously, but with a warmth of feeling which made him raise his eyelids and expose a double horizon of eye. I seemed to have seen this look before, and yet I had met the historian for the first time this afternoon. Suddenly I remembered having seen the same expression in the eyes of a Brazilian doctor who claimed to be able to cure choking fits of the kind from which I suffered by some absurd inhalation of the essential oils of plants. When, in the hope that he would pay more attention to my case, I had told him that I knew Professor Cottard, he had replied, as though speaking in Cottard’s interest: “Now this treatment of mine, if you were to tell him about it, would give him the material for a most sensational paper for the Academy of Medicine!” He had not ventured to press the matter but had stood gazing at me with the same air of interrogation, timid, anxious, appealing, which it had just puzzled me to see on the face of the historian of the Fronde. Obviously the two men were not acquainted and had little or nothing in common, but psychological like physical laws have a more or less general application. And the requisite conditions are the same; an identical expression lights the eyes of different human animals, as a single