Ardan often risked much and got nothing.

He was perfectly disinterested and chivalric; he would not have signed the death-warrant of his worst enemy, and would have sold himself into slavery to redeem a negro.
In France and Europe everybody knew this brilliant, bustling person.

Did he not get talked of ceaselessly by the hundred voices of Fame, hoarse in his service?
Did he not live in a glass house, taking the entire universe as confidant of his most intimate secrets?
But he also possessed an admirable collection of enemies amongst those he had cuffed and wounded whilst using his elbows to make a passage in the crowd.
Still he was generally liked and treated like a spoiled child.

Every one was interested in his bold enterprises, and followed them with uneasy mind.

He was known to be so imprudent! When some friend wished to stop him by predicting an approaching catastrophe, "The forest is only burnt by its own trees," he answered with an amiable smile, not knowing that he was quoting the prettiest of Arabian proverbs.
Such was the passenger of the _Atlanta_, always in a bustle, always boiling under the action of inward fire, always moved, not by what he had come to do in America--he did not even think about it--but on account of his feverish organisation.