You study them with all that you know of their origin and their heredity, and little by little beneath the varnish of cosmopolitanism you discover their race, irresistible, indestructible race!  In the mistress of the house, very elegant, very cultured, for example, a Madame Steno, you discover the descendant of the Doges, the patrician of the fifteenth century, with the form of a queen, strength in her passion and frankness in her incomparable immorality; while in a Florent Chapron or a Lydia you discover the primitive slave, the black hypnotized by the white, the unfreed being produced by centuries of servitude; while in a Madame Gorka you recognize beneath her smiling amiability the fanaticism of truth of the Puritans; beneath the artistic refinement of a Lincoln Maitland you find the squatter, invincibly coarse and robust; in Boleslas Gorka all the nervous irritability of the Slav, which has ruined Poland.  These lineaments of race are hardly visible in the civilized person, who speaks three or four languages fluently, who has lived in Paris, Nice, Florence, here, that same fashionable, monotonous life.  But when passion strikes its blow, when the man is stirred to his inmost depths, then occurs the conflict of characteristics, more surprising when the people thus brought together have come from afar:  And that is why,” he concluded with a laugh, “I have spent six months in Rome without hardly having seen a Roman, busy, observing the little clan which is so revolting to you.  It is probably the twentieth I have studied, and I shall no doubt study twenty more, for not one resembles another.  Are you indulgently inclined toward me, now that you have got even with me in making me hold forth at this corner, like the hero of a Russian novel?  Well, now adieu.”

Montfanon had listened to the discourse with an inpenetrable air.  In the religious solitude in which he was awaiting the end, as he said, nothing afforded him greater pleasure than the discussion of ideas.  But he was inspired by the enthusiasm of a man who feels with extreme ardor, and when he was met by the partly ironical dilettanteism of Dorsenne he was almost pained by it, so much the more so as the author and he had some common theories, notably an extreme fancy for heredity and race.  A sort of discontented grimace distorted his expressive face.  He clicked his tongue in ill-humor, and said: 

“One more question!....  And the result of all that, the object?  To what end does all this observation lead you?”

“To what should it lead me?  To comprehend, as I have told you,” replied Dorsenne.

“And then?”

“There is no then,” answered the young man, “one debauchery is like another.”

“But among the people whom you see living thus,” said Montfanon, after a pause, “there are some surely whom you like and whom you dislike, for whom you entertain esteem and for whom you feel contempt?  Have you not thought that you have some duties toward them, that you can aid them in leading better lives?”