"Sometimes,in the morning,the Count took exercise in his garden,to and fro,like a man to whom a walk is the hippogryph ridden by dreamy melancholy.He walked and walked!And he rubbed his hands enough to rub the skin off.And then,if I met him unexpectedly as he came to the angle of a path,I saw his face beaming.His eyes,instead of the hardness of a turquoise,had that velvety softness of the blue periwinkle,which had so much struck me on the occasion of my first visit,by reason of the astonishing contrast in the two different looks;the look of a happy man,and the look of an unhappy man.Two or three times at such a moment he had taken me by the arm and led me on;then he had said,'What have you come to ask?'instead of pouring out his joy into my heart that opened to him.But more often,especially since I could do his work for him and write his reports,the unhappy man would sit for hours staring at the goldfish that swarmed in a handsome marble basin in the middle of the garden,round which grew an amphitheatre of the finest flowers.He,an accomplished statesman,seemed to have succeeded in making a passion of the mechanical amusement of crumbling bread to fishes.
"This is how the drama was disclosed of this second inner life,so deeply ravaged and storm-tossed,where,in a circle overlooked by Dante in his /Inferno/,horrible joys had their birth."The Consul-General paused.
"On a certain Monday,"he resumed,"as chance would have it,M.le President de Grandville and M.de Serizy (at that time Vice-President of the Council of State)had come to hold a meeting at Comte Octave's house.They formed a committee of three,of which I was the secretary.
The Count had already got me the appointment of Auditor to the Council of State.All the documents requisite for their inquiry into the political matter privately submitted to these three gentlemen were laid out on one of the long tables in the library.MM.de Grandville and de Serizy had trusted to the Count to make the preliminary examination of the papers relating to the matter.To avoid the necessity for carrying all the papers to M.de Serizy,as president of the commission,it was decided that they should meet first in the Rue Payenne.The Cabinet at the Tuileries attached great importance to this piece of work,of which the chief burden fell on me--and to which I owed my appointment,in the course of that year,to be Master of Appeals.