So much for her.  But it is not, I see, for her tranquillity, it is mine for which your friendship is concerned; if Pygmalion had not succeeded in giving life to his statue, a pretty life his love would have made him!

To your charitable solicitude I must answer, (1) by asserting my principles (though the word and the thing are utterly out of date); (2) by a certain stupid respect that I feel for conjugal loyalty; (3) by the natural preoccupation which the serious public enterprise I am about to undertake must necessarily give to my mind and imagination.  I must also tell you that I belong, if not by spiritual height, at least by all the tendencies of my mind and character, to that strong and serious school of artists of another age who, finding that art is long and life is short—­ars longa et vita brevis—­did not commit the mistake of wasting their time and lessening their powers of creation by silly and insipid intrigues.

But I have a better reason still to offer you.  As Monsieur de l’Estorade has told you of the really romantic incidents of my first meeting with his wife, you know already that a memory was the cause of my studying her as a model.  Well, that memory, while it attracted me to the beautiful countess, is the strongest of all reasons to keep me from her.  This appears to you, I am sure, sufficiently enigmatical and far-fetched; but wait till I explain it.

If you had not thought proper to break the thread of our intercourse, I should not to-day be obliged to take up the arrears of our confidence; as it is, my dear boy, you must now take your part in my past history and listen to me bravely.

In 1835, the last year of my stay in Rome, I became quite intimate with a comrade in the Academy named Desroziers.  He was a musician and a man of distinguished and very observing mind, who would probably have gone far in his art if malarial fever had not put an end to him the following year.  Suddenly the idea took possession of us to go to Sicily, one of the excursions permitted by the rules of the school; but as we were radically “dry,” as they say, we walked about Rome for some time endeavoring to find some means of recruiting our finances.  On one of these occasions we happened to pass before the Palazzo Braschi.  Its wide-open doors gave access to the passing and repassing of a crowd of persons of all sorts.

“Parbleu!” exclaimed Desroziers, “here’s the very thing for us.”

And without explaining his words or where he was taking me, he made me follow the crowd and enter the palace.

After mounting a magnificent marble staircase and crossing a very long suite of apartments rather poorly furnished,—­which is customary in Italian palaces, all their luxury being put into ceilings, statues, paintings, and other objects of art,—­we reached a room that was wholly hung with black and lighted by quantities of tapers.  It was, of course, a chambre-ardente.  In the middle of it on a raised platform surmounted by a baldaquin, lay a thing, the most hideous and grotesque thing you can possibly conceive.  Imagine a little old man whose hands and face had reached such a stage of emaciation that a mummy would have seemed to you in comparison plump and comely.