His natural disposition was as trustful and unsuspicious as it was artless and ingenuous; and from his early youth all the lessons which had been taught him by his parents tended to preserve in him unblemished and unbroken that bright gem, which once shattered never can be restored, confidence in the truth, the probity, the goodness of mankind. Some ruder schooling he had met in the course of his service in the eastern world--he had already learned that men, and--harder knowledge yet to gain--women also, can feign friendship, ay, and love, where neither have the least root in the heart, for purposes the vilest, ends the most sordid. He had learned that bosom friends can be secret foes; that false loves can betray; and yet he was not disenchanted with humanity, he had not even dreamed of doubting, because he had fallen among worldly-minded flatterers and fickle-hearted coquettes, that absolute friendship and unchangeable love may exist, even in this evil world, stainless and incorruptible among all the changes and chances of this mortal life. If he had been deceived, he had attributed the failure of his hopes hitherto to the right cause--the fallacy of his own judgment, and the error of his own choice; and the more he had been disappointed the more firmly had he relied on what he felt certain could not change, the affection of his parents, the love of his betrothed bride. On the very instant of his landing he found himself shipwrecked in his first hope; and on his earliest interview with his uncle, in Paris, he had the agony--the utter and appalling agony to undergo--of hearing that in the only promise which he had flattered himself was yet left to him, he was destined in all probability to undergo a deeper, deadlier disappointment. If Melanie d’Argenson had been a lovely girl, the good abbé said, when she was budding out of childhood into youth, so utterly had she outstripped all the promise of her girlhood, that no words could describe, nor imagination suggest to itself the charms of the mature yet youthful woman. There was no other beauty named, when loveliness was the theme, throughout all France, than that of the young betrothed of Raoul de Douarnenez. And that which was so loudly and so widely bruited abroad, could not fail to reach the ever open, ever greedy ears of the vile and sensual tyrant who sat on the throne of France, at that time heaping upon his people that load of suffering and anguish which was in after-times to be avenged so bitterly and bloodily upon the innocent heads of his unhappy descendants. Louis had, moreover, heard years before, nay, looked upon the nascent loveliness of Melanie d’Argenson, and, with that cold-blooded voluptuary, to look on beauty was to lust after it, to lust after it was to devote all the powers his despotism could command to win it.