A certain dignity could not be denied him, and, on occasion, a proper reserve; he rarely mentioned his business--though he worked like a slave, and could not have been making much or any profit--so that there rose the query how he contrived to make both ends meet.

Little by little I came into the knowledge that there was a money supply from somewhere; finally, it matters not how, that he had an annuity of forty thousand francs, paid in quarterly installments of ten thousand francs each.
Occasionally he mentioned "the Old House," and in relating the famous Sophonisba episode late at night, and only in the very fastnesses of the wine cellar, as it were, at the most lachrymose passage he spoke of "l'Oncle Celestin," with the deepest feeling.
"Did you ever hear The Frenchman tell that story about Sophonisba ?" Doctor Stoic, whom on account of his affectation of insensibility we were wont to call Old Adamant, once asked me.

"Well, sir, the other night he told it to me, and he was drunk, and he cried, sir; and I was drunk, and I cried too!" I had known The Frenchman now ten or a dozen years.

That he came from Marseilles, that he had served on the Confederate side in the Trans-Mississippi, that he possessed an annuity, that he must have been well-born and reared, that he was simple, yet canny, and in his money dealings scrupulously honest--was all I could be sure of.

What had he done to be ashamed about or wish to conceal?
In what was he a black sheep, for that he had been one seemed certain?
Had the beautiful woman, his wife--a tireless church and charity worker, who lived the life of a recluse and a saint--had she reclaimed him from his former self?
I knew that she had been the immediate occasion of his turning over a new leaf.
But before her time what had he been, what had he done?
Late one night, when the rain was falling and the streets were empty, I entered The Brunswick.