It was not without pain that he beheld Nelville tete-a-tete with Corinne, but he was accustomed to dissimulate his feelings.  This habit, which is often found in the Italians united with great vehemence of sensation, was in him rather the result of indolence and of natural gentleness.  He was content not to be the first object of Corinne’s affections; he was no longer young; he possessed great intelligence, considerable taste for the arts, an imagination sufficiently animated to diversify life without disturbing it, and such a desire to pass all his evenings with Corinne, that if she were to be married he would conjure her husband to let him come every day, to see her as usual, and upon this condition he would not have been very unhappy at seeing her united to another.  The grief of the heart is not found in Italy complicated with the sufferings of vanity, so that we find there, men either passionate enough to stab their rival through jealousy, or men modest enough to take willingly the second rank in the favour of a lady whose conversation is agreeable to them; but rarely will be found any who for fear of being thought despised, would refuse to preserve any sort of connection which they found pleasing.  The empire of society over self-esteem is almost null in this country.

The Count d’Erfeuil and the company that met every evening at Corinne’s house being assembled, the conversation turned upon the talent for improvisation which their heroine had so gloriously displayed at the Capitol, and they went so far as to ask her own opinion of it.  “It is something so rare,” said Prince Castel-Forte, “to find any one at once susceptible of enthusiasm and of analysis, gifted as an artist and capable of observing herself, that we must intreat her to reveal to us the secrets of her genius.”  “The talent for improvisation,” replied Corinne, “is not more extraordinary in the languages of the south, than the eloquence of the tribune, or the brilliant vivacity of conversation in other tongues.  I will even say that, unfortunately it is with us more easy to make verses impromptu than to speak well in prose.  The language of poetry is so different from that of prose, that from the first verses the attention is commanded by the expressions themselves, which, if I may so express it, place the poet at a distance from his auditors.  It is not only to the softness of the Italian language, but much more to its strong and pronounced vibration of sonorous syllables, that we must attribute the empire of poetry amongst us.  There is a kind of musical charm in Italian, by which the bare sound of words, almost independently of the ideas, produces pleasure; besides, these words have almost all something picturesque in them; they paint what they express.  You feel that it is in the midst of the arts, and under an auspicious sky that this melodious, and highly-coloured language has been formed.  It is therefore more easy in Italy than any where else, to seduce with