“It is unequalled!” said Dorsenne, crumpling the letter with rising anger.  “He embraces me with all his heart.  I am his most sincere friend!  I am chivalrous, French, the only person he esteems!  What disagreeable commission does he wish me to undertake for him?  Into what scrape is he about to ask me to enter, if he has not already got me into it?  I know that school of protestation.  We are allied for life and death, are we not?  Do me a favor!  And they upset your habits, encroach upon your time, embark you in tragedies, and when you say ‘No’ to them-then they squarely accuse you of selfishness and of treason!  It is my fault, too.  Why did I listen to his confidences?  Have I not known for years that a man who relates his love-affairs on so short an acquaintance as ours is a scoundrel and a fool?  And with such people there can be no possible connection.  He amused me at the beginning, when he told me his sly intrigue, without naming the person, as they all do at first.  He amused me still more by the way he managed to name her without violating that which people in society call honor.  And to think that the women believe in that honor and that discretion!  And yet it was the surest means of entering Steno’s, and approaching Alba....  I believe I am about to pay for my Roman flirtation.  If Gorka is a Pole, I am from Lorraine, and the heir of the Castellans will only make me do what I agree to, nothing more.”

In such an ill-humor and with such a resolution, Julien reached the door of his house.  If that dwelling was not the palace alluded to by Signorina Sabatina, it was neither the usually common house as common today in new Rome as in contemporary Paris, modern Berlin, and in certain streets of London opened of late in the neighborhood of Hyde Park.  It was an old building on the Place de la Trinite-des-Monts, at an angle of the two streets Sistina and Gregoriana.  Although reduced to the state of a simple pension, more or less bourgeoise, that house had its name marked in certain guide-books, and like all the corners of ancient Rome it preserved the traces of a glorious, artistic history.  The small columns of the porch gave it the name of the tempietto, or little temple, while several personages dear to litterateurs had lived there, from the landscape painter Claude Lorrain to the poet Francois Coppee.  A few paces distant, almost opposite, lived Poussin, and one of the greatest among modern English poets, Keats, died quite near by, the John Keats whose tomb is to be seen in Rome, with that melancholy epitaph upon it, written by himself: 

     Here lies one whose name was writ in water.

It was seldom that Dorsenne returned home without repeating to himself the translation he had attempted of that beautiful ’Ci-git un don’t le nom, jut ecrit sur de l’eau’.

Sometimes he repeated, at evening, this delicious fragment: 

The sky was tinged with tender green and pink.

This time he entered in a more prosaic manner; for he addressed the concierge in the tone of a jealous husband or a debtor hunted by creditors: