Villette

night, and God bless you!«
    Thus I closed my musings. »Good night« left my lips in sound; I heard the two words spoken, and then I heard an echo – quite close.
    »Good night, mademoiselle; or, rather, good evening – the sun is scarce set; I hope you slept well?«
    I started, but was only discomposed a moment; I knew the voice and speaker.
    »Slept, monsieur! When? where?«
    »You may well inquire when – where. It seems you turn day into night, and choose a desk for a pillow; rather hard lodging –?«
    »It was softened for me, monsieur, while I slept. That unseen, gift-bringing thing which haunts my desk, remembered me. No matter how I fell asleep; I awoke pillowed and covered.«
    »Did the shawls keep you warm?«
    »Very warm. Do you ask thanks for them?«
    »No. You looked pale in your slumbers; are you homesick?«
    »To be home-sick, one must have a home; which I have not.«
    »Then you have more need of a careful friend. I scarcely know any one, Miss Lucy, who needs a friend more absolutely than you; your very faults imperatively require it. You want so much checking, regulating, and keeping down.«
    This idea of ›keeping down‹ never left M. Paul's head; the most habitual subjugation would, in my case, have failed to relieve him of it. No matter; what did it signify? I listened to him, and did not trouble myself to be too submissive; his occupation would have been gone, had I left him nothing to ›keep down.‹
    »You need watching, and watching over,« he pursued, »and it is well for you that I see this, and do my best to discharge both duties. I watch you and others pretty closely, pretty constantly, nearer and oftener than you or they think. Do you see that window with a light in it?«
    He pointed to a lattice in one of the college boarding-houses.
    »That,« said he, »is a room I have hired, nominally for a study – virtually for a post of observation. There I sit and read for hours together: it is my way – my taste. My book is this garden; its contents are human nature – female human nature. I know you all by heart. Ah! I know you well – St Pierre the Parisienne – cette maîtresse-femme, my cousin Beck herself.«
    »It is not right, monsieur.«
    »Comment; it is not right? By whose creed? Does some dogma of Calvin or Luther condemn it? What is that to me? I am no Protestant. My rich father (for, though I have known poverty, and once starved for a year in a garret in Rome – starved wretchedly, often on a meal a day, and sometimes not that – yet I was born to wealth) – my rich father was a good Catholic; and he gave me a priest and a Jesuit for a tutor. I retain his lessons; and to what discoveries, grand Dieu! have they not aided me!«
    »Discoveries made by stealth seem to me dishonourable discoveries.«
    »Puritaine! I doubt it not. Yet see how my Jesuit's system works. You know the St Pierre?«
    »Partially.«
    He laughed. »You say right – ›
partially;
‹ whereas,
I
know her
thoroughly;
there is the difference. She played before me the amiable; offered me patte de velours; caressed, flattered, fawned on me. Now, I am accessible to a woman's flattery – accessible against my reason. Though never pretty, she was – when I first knew her – young, or knew how to look young. Like all her countrywomen, she had the art of dressing – she had a certain, cool, easy, social assurance, which spared me the pain of embarrassment –«
    »Monsieur, that must have been unnecessary. I never saw you embarrassed in my life.«
    »Mademoiselle, you know little of me; I can be embarrassed as a petite pensionnaire; there is a fund of modesty and diffidence in my nature –«
    »Monsieur, I never saw it.«
    »Mademoiselle, it is there. You ought to have seen it.«
    »Monsieur, I have observed you in public – on platforms, in tribunes, before titles and crowned heads – and you were as easy as you are in the third division.«
    »Mademoiselle, neither titles nor crowned heads excite my modesty; and publicity is very much my element. I like it well, and breathe in it quite freely; but – but – in short, here is the sentiment brought into action, at this very moment; however, I disdain to be worsted by it. If, mademoiselle, I were a marrying man (which I am not; and you may spare yourself the trouble of any sneer you may be contemplating at the thought), and found it necessary to ask a lady whether she could look upon me in the light of a future husband, then would it be proved that I