Marmet’s tongue is very sweet, but the salt is near it, in her eyes.  Her conversation is like Pompaloni’s dish, my love—­each one seasons to his taste.  Oh, I like Madame Marmet a great deal.  Yesterday, after you had gone, I found her alone and sad in a corner of the drawing-room.  She was thinking mournfully of her husband.  I said to her:  ’Do you wish me to think of your husband, too?  I will think of him with you.  I have been told that he was a learned man, a member of the Royal Society of Paris.  Madame Marmet, talk to me of him.’  She replied that he had devoted himself to the Etruscans, and that he had given to them his entire life.  Oh, darling, I cherished at once the memory of that Monsieur Marmet, who lived for the Etruscans.  And then a good idea came to me.  I said to Madame Marmet, ’We have at Fiesole, in the Pretorio Palace, a modest little Etruscan museum.  Come and visit it with me.  Will you?’ She replied it was what she most desired to see in Italy.  We went to the Pretorio Palace; we saw a lioness and a great many little bronze figures, grotesque, very fat or very thin.  The Etruscans were a seriously gay people.  They made bronze caricatures.  But the monkeys—­some afflicted with big stomachs, others astonished to show their bones—­Madame Marmet looked at them with reluctant admiration.  She contemplated them like—­there is a beautiful French word that escapes me—­like the monuments and the trophies of Monsieur Marmet.”

Madame Martin smiled.  But she was restless.  She thought the sky dull, the streets ugly, the passers-by common.

“Oh, darling, the Prince will be very glad to receive you in his palace.”

“I do not think so.”

“Why, darling, why?”

“Because I do not please him much.”

Vivian Bell declared that the Prince, on the contrary, was a great admirer of the Countess Martin.

The horses stopped before the Albertinelli palace.  On the sombre facade were sealed those bronze rings which formerly, on festival nights, held rosin torches.  These bronze rings mark, in Florence, the palaces of the most illustrious families.  The palace had an air of lofty pride.  The Prince hastened to meet them, and led them through the empty salons into the gallery.  He, apologized for showing canvases which perhaps had not an attractive aspect.  The gallery had been formed by Cardinal Giulio Albertinelli at a time when the taste for Guido and Caraccio, now fallen, had predominated.  His ancestor had taken pleasure in gathering the works of the school of Bologna.  But he would show to Madame Martin several paintings which had not displeased Miss Bell, among others a Mantegna.

The Countess Martin recognized at once a banal and doubtful collection; she felt bored among the multitude of little Parrocels, showing in the darkness a bit of armor and a white horse.

A valet presented a card.

The Prince read aloud the name of Jacques Dechartre.  At that moment he was turning his back on the two visitors.  His face wore the expression of cruel displeasure one finds on the marble busts of Roman emperors.  Dechartre was on the staircase.