“At home,” said Peppino, “lunching.”

“Very well,” replied Boleslas, and, raising himself, he whispered in the cabman’s ear, in a voice too low for his friend to hear what he said:  “Ten francs for you if in five minutes you drive me to the corner of the Rue Napoleon III and the Place de la Victor-Emmanuel.”

The man gathered up his reins, and, by some sleight-of-hand, the jaded horse which drew the botte was suddenly transformed into a fine Roman steed, the botte itself into a light carriage as swift as the Tuscan carrozzelle, and the whole disappeared in a cross street, while Peppino said to himself: 

“There is a fine fellow who would do so much better to remain with his friend Ardea than to go whither he is going.  This affair will end in a duel.  If I had not to liquidate that folly,” and he pointed out with the end of his cane a placard relative to the sale of his own palace, “I would amuse myself by taking Caterina from both of them.  But those little amusements must wait until after my marriage.”

As we have seen, the cunning Prince had not been mistaken as to the course taken by the cab Gorka had hailed.  It was indeed into the neighborhood of the atelier occupied by Maitland that the discarded lover hastened, but not to the atelier.  The madman wished to prove to himself that the exhibition of his despair had availed him nothing, and that, scarcely rid of him, Madame Steno had repaired to the other.  What would it avail him to know it and what would the evidence prove?  Had the Countess concealed those sittings—­those convenient sittings—­as the jealous lover had told Dorsenne?  The very thought of them caused the blood to flow in his veins much more feverishly than did the thoughts of the other meetings.  For those he could still doubt, notwithstanding the anonymous letters, notwithstanding the tete-a-tete on the terrace, notwithstanding the insolent “Linco,” whom she had addressed thus before him, while of the long intimacies of the studio he was certain.  They maddened him, and, at the same time, by that strange contradiction which is characteristic of all jealousy, he hungered and thirsted to prove them.

He alighted from his cab at the corner he had named to his cabman, and from which point he could watch the Rue Leopardi, in which was his rival’s house.  It was a large structure in the Moorish style, built by the celebrated Spanish artist, Juan Santigosa, who had been obliged to sell all five years before—­house, studio, horses, completed paintings, sketches begun—­in order to pay immense losses at gaming.  Florent Chapron had at the time bought the sort of counterfeit Alhambra, a portion of which he rented to his brother-in-law.  During the few moments that he stood at the corner, Boleslas Gorka recalled having visited that house the previous year, while taking, in the company of Madame Steno, Alba, Maud, and Hafner, one of those walks of which fashionable women are so fond in Rome