enemy of the Countess, a confrere of Maitland.  Such pieces of infamy occur among good friends.  If Gorka, who is a shot like Casal, kills Maitland in a duel, it will make one deceiver less.  If he avenges himself upon his mistress for that treason, it would be a matter of indifference to me, for Catherine Steno is a great rogue....  But my little friend, my poor, charming Alba, what would become of her if there should be a scandal, bloodshed, perhaps, on account of her mother’s folly?  Gorka returned?  And he did not write it to me, to me who have received several letters from him since he went away; to me, whom he selected last autumn as the confidant of his jealousies, under the pretext that I knew women, and, with the vain hope of inspiring me....  His silence and return no longer seem like a romance; they savor rather of a drama, and with a Slav, as much a Slav as he is, one may expect anything.  I know not what to think of it, for he will be at the Palais Castagna.  Poor, charming Alba!”

The monologue did not differ much from a monologue uttered under similar circumstances by any young man interested in a young girl whose mother does not conduct herself becomingly.  It was a touching situation, but a very common one, and there was no necessity for the author to come to Rome to study it, one entire winter and spring.  If that interest went beyond a study, Dorsenne possessed a very simple means of preventing his little friend, as he said, from being rendered unhappy by the conduct of that mother whom age did not conquer.  Why not propose for her hand?  He had inherited a fortune, and his success as an author had augmented it.  For, since the first book which had established his reputation, the ‘Etudes de Femmes,’ published in 1879, not a single one of the fifteen novels or selections from novels had remained unnoticed.  His personal celebrity could, strictly speaking, combine with it family celebrity, for he boasted that his grandfather was a cousin of that brave General Dorsenne whom Napoleon could only replace at the head of his guard by Friant.  All can be told in a word.  Although the heirs of the hero of the Empire had never recognized the relationship, Julien believed in it, and when he said, in reply to compliments on his books, “At my age my grand-uncle, the Colonel of the Guard, did greater things,” he was sincere in his belief.  But it was unnecessary to mention it, for, situated as he was, Countess Steno would gladly have accepted him as a son-in-law.  As for gaining the love of the young girl, with his handsome face, intelligent and refined, and his elegant form, which he had retained intact in spite of his thirty-seven years, he might have done so.  Nothing, however, was farther from his thoughts than such a project, for, as he ascended the steps of the staircase of the palace formerly occupied by Urban VII, he continued, in very different terms, his monologue, a species of involuntary “copy” which is written instinctively in the brain of the man of letters when he is particularly fond of literature.