of the Place d’Espagne, meritorious in him, for with his one arm and burdened with the prayer-book it required a veritable effort to search in his pocket.  Dorsenne was well enough acquainted with that original personage to know that he had never been able to say “no” to any one who asked charity, great or small, of him.  Thanks to that system, the enemy of beautiful Fanny Hafner was always short of cash with forty thousand francs’ income and leading a simple existence.  The costly purchase of the relic of Montluc proved that the antipathy conceived for Baron Justus’s charming daughter had become a species of passion.  Under any other circumstances, the novelist, who delighted in such cases, would not have failed to meditate ironically on that feeling, easy enough of explanation.  There was much more irrational instinct in it than Montfanon himself suspected.  The old leaguer would not have been logical if he had not had in point of race an inquisition partiality, and the mere suspicion of Jewish origin should have prejudiced him against Fanny.  But he was just, as Dorsenne had told him, and if the young girl had been an avowed Jewess, living up zealously to her religion, he would have respected but have avoided her, and he never would have spoken of her with such bitterness.

The true motive of his antipathy was that he loved Cardinal Guerillot, as was his habit in all things, with passion and with jealousy, and he could not forgive Mademoiselle Hafner for having formed an intimacy with the holy prelate in spite of him, Montfanon, who had vainly warned the old Bishop de Clermont against her whom he considered the most wily of intriguers.  For months vainly did she furnish proofs of her sincerity of heart, the Cardinal reporting them in due season to the Marquis, who persisted in discrediting them, and each fresh good deed of his enemy augmented his hatred by aggravating the uneasiness which was caused him, notwithstanding all, by a vague sense of his iniquity.

But Dorsenne no sooner turned toward the direction of the Palais Castagna than he quickly forgot both Mademoiselle Hafner’s and Montfanon’s prejudices, in thinking only of one sentence uttered by the latter that which related to the return of Boleslas Gorka.  The news was unexpected, and it awakened in the writer such grave fears that he did not even glance at the shop-window of the French bookseller at the corner of the Corso to see if the label of the “Fortieth thousand” flamed upon the yellow cover of his last book, the Eclogue Mondaine, brought out in the autumn, with a success which his absence of six months from Paris, had, however, detracted from.  He did not even think of ascertaining if the regimen he practised, in imitation of Lord Byron, against embonpoint, would preserve his elegant form, of which he was so proud, and yet mirrors were numerous on the way from the Place d’Espagne to the Palais Castagna, which rears its sombre mass on the margin of the Tiber, at the extremity of the