Raymond de Chelles, who came of
a family of moderate fortune, lived for the greater part of the year on
his father's estates in Burgundy; but he came up every spring to the
entresol of the old Marquis's hotel for a two months' study of human
nature, applying to the pursuit the discriminating taste and transient
ardour that give the finest bloom to pleasure. Bowen liked him as a
companion and admired him as a charming specimen of the Frenchman of his
class, embodying in his lean, fatigued and finished person that happy
mean of simplicity and intelligence of which no other race has found the
secret. If Raymond de Chelles had been English he would have been a
mere fox-hunting animal, with appetites but without tastes; but in his
lighter Gallic clay the wholesome territorial savour, the inherited
passion for sport and agriculture, were blent with an openness to finer
sensations, a sense of the come-and-go of ideas, under which one felt
the tight hold of two or three inherited notions, religious, political,
and domestic, in total contradiction to his surface attitude. That the
inherited notions would in the end prevail, everything in his appearance
declared from the distinguished slant of his nose to the narrow forehead
under his thinning hair; he was the kind of man who would inevitably
"revert" when he married. But meanwhile the surface he presented to the
play of life was broad enough to take in the fantastic spectacle of the
Nouveau Luxe; and to see its gestures reflected in a Latin consciousness
was an endless entertainment to Bowen.
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