Their talk often ended thus, by the recollection of an old impression, in mystic and shy plaints. Calixte was gentle towards life, which had not shown him the same clemency. No one knew what he sought, excepting the fine editions of old poets and the mysterious modern prints: his disdain of all vainglory was more sincere than that of Entragues, in whom heredity determined a dim need of social domination. Entragues strove to scorn life. During the long and painful reckonings of his tutelage, he had undergone, without external revolt, the humiliation of a lowly situation, a horror of the forced fabrication of worthless copy for miserly publishers. The verdict of several lawsuits had despoiled him of the relics of his patrimony; but he would have consented to a Castilian wretchedness rather than abandon his dream. He wished to regild his name, and, encircled by glory, he hated the present, as an obstacle, but he would have liked to assume the existence that was due him, to put it on like a ducal cloak, without astonishment, with the satisfaction of a lord returning to his domains. He was waiting; nothing would have surprised him, but neither did the nothing surprise him: hence, the infinite contradictions of his character and conduct. He knew his nature and had applied to himself, with a joy which revealed the triplicity of his soul, this line of Dante:
"And without hope live in desire." His triplicity, a quite elementary scholastic division, he thus explained: a soul that wills, a soul that knows the uselessness of willing, a soul that watches the struggle of the other two and writes the Iliad of it.
He had no naïveté, save perhaps in his rare unfortunate crises, for in his normal state his proud indifference of principle saved him from anger and its consequences. Thus, his indignation against Moscowitch had become deadened after the first thought of vengeance, and he was the man, on matters that did not touch the essentials, to give up a thing in despair, send the handle after the ax. But he was also the man to lift and unite the fallen instrument. He was the man to do the contrary of what he pretended to do, but as his acts were a spectacle to himself, and the most amusing of all spectacles, he never let it sadden him beyond measure. He knew himself full of the unexpected and liked it: ah! without this he surely would have been wearied, for the rest of the world unrolled itself to his wearied eyes but as a circus performance, truly too monotonous; the world was peopled by vague and distant phantoms thrown on the eternally trod course.