“Have you given the key to any one, Tonino?” he asked.

“Count Gorka said that your Excellency asked him to await you here,” replied the man, with a timidity rendered all the more comical by the formidable cut of his gray moustache and his imperial, which made him a caricature of the late King Victor Emmanuel.

He had served in ’59 under the Galantuomo, and he paid the homage of a veteran of Solferino to that glorious memory.  His large eyes rolled with fear at the least confusion, and he repeated: 

“Yes, he said that your Excellency asked him to wait,” while Dorsenne ascended the staircase, saying aloud:  “More and more perfect.  But this time the familiarity passes all bounds; and it is better so.  I have been so surprised and annoyed from the first that I shall be easily able to refuse the imprudent fellow what he will ask of me.”  In his anger the novelist sought to arm himself against his weakness, of which he was aware—­not the weakness of insufficient will, but of a too vivid perception of the motives which the person with whom he was in conflict obeyed.  He, however, was to learn that there is no greater dissolvent of rancor than intelligent curiosity.  His was, indeed, aroused by a simple detail, which consisted in ascertaining under what conditions the Pole had travelled; his dressing-case, his overcoat and his hat, still white with the dust of travel, were lying upon the table in the antechamber.

Evidently he had come direct from Warsaw to the Place de la Trinite-des-Monts.  A prey to what delirium of passion?  Dorsenne had not time to ask the question any more than he had presence of mind to compose his manner to such severity that it would cut short all familiarity on the part of his strange visitor.  At the noise made by the opening of the antechamber door, Boleslas started up.  He seized both hands of the man into whose apartments he had obtruded himself.  He pressed them.  He gazed at him with feverish eyes, with eyes which had not closed for hours, and he murmured, drawing the novelist into the tiny salon: 

“You have come, Julien, you are here!  Ah, I thank you for having answered my call at once!  Let me look at you, for I am sure I have a friend beside me, one in whom I can trust, with whom I can speak frankly, upon whom I can depend.  If this solitude had lasted much longer I should have become mad.”

Although Madame Steno’s lover belonged to the class of excitable, nervous people who exaggerate their feelings by an unconscious wildness of tone and of manner, his face bore the traces of a trouble too deep not to be startling.

Julien, who had seen him set out, three months before, so radiantly handsome, was struck by the change which had taken place during such a brief absence.  He was the same Boleslas Gorka, that handsome man, that admirable human animal, so refined and so strong, in which was embodied centuries of aristocracy—­the Counts de Gorka belong to the ancient house of Lodzia, with which are connected so many illustrious Polish families, the Opalenice-Opalenskis, the Bnin-Bninskis, the Ponin-Poniniskis and many others—­but his cheeks were sunken beneath his long, brown beard, in which were glints of gold; his eyes were heavy as if from wakeful nights, his nostrils were pinched and his face was pale.  The travel-stains upon his face accentuated the alteration.