"Fifty years later I saw the portrait of the young count, and heard his history. He looked unhappy and despairing, as though he were weary of everything. He had passed through the bitterest experiences of life, including poverty for a time. His affairs came into liquidation, and he had to spend ten years abroad in an hotel, his expenses being defrayed by his creditors. He also had his wife with him, who, as she thought, had married into paradise, in order to be immediately driven out of it again. The man had been nothing and had done nothing; all he could do was to wait for his meals. He had possessed horses and a yacht; he had gambled and borrowed money; he had eaten truffles and drunk wine; but when he was forty had to give it up, for his nose grew red and he had gout in his great toe. I will not speak of his domestic miseries. "Now he sits in his castle, rich as Crœsus, but lonely, and educates his housekeeper's children, which are his, but which cannot bear his name. His evening meal consists of gruel, and he goes to bed at half-past nine. He dares not use his wine-cellar, for then his great toe aches. His solitary comparative pleasure is to be able to walk, in order to eat his gruel and be able to sleep. Envy nobody!" =The Galley-slaves of Ambition.=--The teacher said: "Balzac speaks in one place of the galley-slaves of ambition, and describes their condition very much as Swedenborg describes certain of his hells, or as Homer depicts Tantalus, Ixion, and the Danaides. They are ceaselessly haunted by their passion to be superior to others; to be seen and heard before all others. The malice and love of power which this involves are necessarily punished. When the ambitious man cannot be the first and only one he becomes ill. Voltaire had to go to bed when a prince travelled past his house without visiting him. If one of such people's letters remains unanswered they think it is a sign that their credit has sunk, and they worry about the reason of it till they grow how hypochondriacal. If they read in the paper such and such important people were present when the king landed, and their names are omitted, the world is darkened for them. That is to say, it is not enough for them that they should be praised and called the greatest; they suffer pains like death when others are eulogised. They feel perpetual fear lest they should be set aside and their juniors get ahead of them. In that they resemble a great criminal who expects to be detected. The portrait of an ambitious man has a great resemblance to that of a galley-slave. Imperiousness, hatred, fear--especially fear--are depicted in his face.