He had always left drawing-room gossip to spread his
reputation with its thousand tongues and, by the mere mention of his
name, fill maids and matrons with an exciting mixture of timid fear and
eager yearning, indignant pride and tender pity. Now a torturing anxiety
beset him lest his great deeds might be forgotten, and he humbled himself
to the character of bard of his own epic poem. He told his last
conquests who, naturally, with self-torturing curiosity inquired about
it, chapter after chapter of the romance of his heart, half-opened his
famous drawers and permitted them to catch a glimpse of letters,
likenesses, and locks of hair; he strove to soothe his self-esteem by
showing what passions he had inspired, at the risk of having his fair
listener, with a secret smile, imagine exaggeration where, in reality, he
was merely boasting.
Such was his mental condition at this time. He had toilsomely erected a
sort of sham paradise of stage scenery, in which he continued to play the
character of the youthful lover, which he was scarcely entitled to
continue in life, and now this luckless doctor, with a careless movement,
had thrown down all the painted canvasses with their artificial scenes.
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