“It is not Madame Steno,” thought Julien; “she has related all herself to her lover.  I knew a similar case.  But it involved degraded Parisians, not a Dogesse of the sixteenth century found intact in the Venice of today, like a flower of that period preserved.  Let us strike her off.  Let us strike off, too, Madame Gorka, the truthful creature who could not even condescend to the smallest lie for a trinket which she desires.  It is that which renders her so easily deceived.  What irony!....  Let us strike off Florent.  He would allow himself to be killed, if necessary, like a Mameluke at the door of the room where his genial brother-in-law was dallying with the Countess....  Let us strike off the American himself.  I have met such a case, a lover weary of a mistress, denouncing himself to her in order to be freed from his love-affair.  But he was a roue, and had nothing in common with this booby, who has a talent for painting as an elephant has a trunk—­what irony!  He married this octoroon to have money.  But it was a base act which freed him from commerce, and permitted him to paint all he wanted, as he wanted.  He allows Steno to love him because she is diabolically pretty, notwithstanding her forty years, and then she is, in spite of all, a real noblewoman, which flattered him.  He has not one dollar’s-worth of moral delicacy in his heart.  But he has an abundance of knavery....  Let us, too, strike out his wife.  She is such a veritable slave whom the mere presence of a white person annihilates to such a degree that she dares not look her husband in the face....  It is not Hafner.  The sly fox is capable of doing anything by cunning, but is he capable of undertaking a useless and dangerous piece of rascality?  Never....  Fanny is a saint escaped from the Golden Legend, no matter what Montfanon thinks!  I have now reviewed the entire coterie....  I was about to forget Alba....  It is too absurd even to think of her....  Too absurd?  Why?”

Dorsenne was, on formulating that fantastic thought, upon the point of retiring.  He took up, as was his habit, one of the books on his table, in order to read a few pages, when once in bed.  He had thus within his reach the works by which he strengthened his doctrine of intransitive intellectuality; they were Goethe’s Memoirs; a volume of George Sand’s correspondence, in which were the letters to Flaubert; the ’Discours de la Methode’ by Descartes, and the essay by Burckhart on the Renaissance.

But, after turning over the leaves of one of those volumes, he closed it without having read twenty lines.  He extinguished his lamp, but he could not sleep.  The strange suspicion which crossed his mind had something monstrous about it, applied thus to a young girl.  What a suspicion and what a young girl!  The preferred friend of his entire winter, she on whose account he had prolonged his stay in Rome, for she was the most graceful vision of delicacy and of melancholy in the framework of a tragical and solemn past.