“’You know the Pole has returned?  What Pole?  The Countess’s.  What?  You believe those calumnies?’ Ah, what comedies here below!  ’Gad!  The cabman has also committed his ‘schlemylade’.  I told him Rue Sistina, near La Trinite-des-Monts, and here he is going through Place Barberini instead of cutting across Capo le Case.  It is my fault as well.  I should not have heeded it had there been an earthquake.  Let us at least admire the Triton of Bernin.  What a sculptor that man was! yet he never thought of nature except to falsify it.”

These incoherent remarks were made with a good-nature decidedly optimistic, as could be seen, when the fiacre finally drew up at the given address.  It was that of a very modest restaurant decorated with this signboard:  ‘Trattoria al Marzocco.’  And the ‘Marzocco’, the lion symbolical of Florence, was represented above the door, resting his paw on the escutcheon ornamented with the national lys.  The appearance of that front did not justify the choice which the elegant Dorsenne had made of the place at which to dine when he did not dine in society.  But his dilettantism liked nothing better than those sudden leaps from society, and M. Egiste Brancadori, who kept the Marzocco, was one of those unconscious buffoons of whom he was continually in search in real life, one of those whom he called his “Thebans”, in reference to King Lear.  “I’ll talk a word with this same learned Theban,” cried the mad king, one knows not why, when he meets “poor Tom” on the heath.

That Dorsenne’s Parisian friends, the Casals, the Machaults, the De Vardes, those habitues of the club, might not judge him too severely, he explained that the Theban born in Florence was a cook of the first order and that the modest restaurant had its story.  It amused so paradoxical an observer as Julien was.  He often said, “Who will ever dare to write the truth of the history?” This, for example:  Pope Pius IX, having asked the Emperor to send him some troops to protect his dominions, the latter agreed to do so—­an occupation which bore two results:  a Corsican hatred of the half of Italy against France and the founding of the Marzocco by Egiste Brancadori, says the Theban or the doctor.  It was one of the pleasantries of the novelist to pretend to have cured his dyspepsia in Italy, thanks to the wise and wholesome cooking of the said Egiste.  In reality, and more simply, Brancadori was the old cook of a Russian lord, one of the Werekiews, the cousin of pretty Alba Steno’s real father.  That Werekiew, renowned in Rome for the daintiness of his dinners, died suddenly in 1866.  Several of the frequenters of his house, advised by a French officer of the army of occupation, and tired of clubs, hotels, and ordinary restaurants, determined to form a syndicate and to employ his former cook.  They, with his cooperation, established a sort of superior cafe, to which with some pride they gave the name of the Culinary Club.  By assuring to each one a