And on this particular morning it was especially disagreeable to him that those eyes had seen him making his unoffending notes, although there was scarcely a shade of gentle condescension—­that of a great lord who patronizes a great artist—­in the manner in which Hafner addressed him.

“Do not inconvenience yourself for me, dear sir,” said he to Dorsenne.  “You work from nature, and you are right.  I see that your next novel will touch upon the ruin of our poor Prince d’Ardea.  Do not be too hard on him, nor on us.”

The artist could not help coloring at that benign pleasantry.  It was all the more painful to him because it was at once true and untrue.  How should he explain the sort of literary alchemy, thanks to which he was enabled to affirm that he never drew portraits, although not a line of his fifteen volumes was traced without a living model?  He replied, therefore, with a touch of ill-humor: 

“You are mistaken, my dear Baron.  I do not make notes on persons.”

“All authors say that,” answered the Baron, shrugging his shoulders with the assumed good-nature which so rarely forsook him, “and they are right....  At any rate, it is fortunate that you had something to write, for we shall both be late in arriving at a rendezvous where there are ladies....  It is almost a quarter past eleven, and we should have been there at eleven precisely....  But I have one excuse, I waited for my daughter.”

“And she has not come?” asked Dorsenne.

“No,” replied Hafner, “at the last moment she could not make up her mind.  She had a slight annoyance this morning—­I do not know what old book she had set her heart on.  Some rascal found out that she wanted it, and he obtained it first....  But that is not the true cause of her absence.  The true cause is that she is too sensitive, and she finds it so sad that there should be a sale of the possessions of this ancient family....  I did not insist.  What would she have experienced had she known the late Princess Nicoletta, Pepino’s mother?  When I came to Rome on a visit for the first time, in ’75, what a salon that was and what a Princess!....  She was a Condolmieri, of the family of Eugene IV.”

“How absurd vanity renders the most refined man,” thought Julien, suiting his pace to the Baron’s.  “He would have me believe that he was received at the house of that woman who was politically the blackest of the black, the most difficult to please in the recruiting of her salon....  Life is more complex than the Montfanons even know of!  This girl feels by instinct that which the chouan of a marquis feels by doctrine, the absurdity of this striving after nobility, with a father who forgets the broker and who talks of the popes of the Middle Ages as of a trinket!....  While we are alone, I must ask this old fox what he knows of Boleslas Gorka’s return.  He is the confidant of Madame Steno.  He should be informed of the doings and whereabouts of the Pole.”