It is here the place of the Chorus to state that these:  ideas were in the air at the time; sparks of the Vulcanic smithy at work in politics and pervading literature:  which both Alvan and Clotilde might catch and give out as their own, in the honest belief that the epigram was, original to them.  They were not members of a country where literature is confined to its little paddock, without, influence on the larger field (part lawn, part marsh) of the social world:  they were readers in sympathetic action with thinkers and literary artists.  Their saying in common, ’Plutarch’s Pompeius,’ may be traceable to a reading of some professorial article on the common portrait-painting of the sage of Chaeroneia.  The dainty savageness in the ‘bite’ Plutarch mentions, evidently struck on a similarity of tastes in both, as it has done with others.  And in regard to Caesar, Clotilde thought much of Caesar; she had often wished that Caesar (for the additional pleasure in thinking of him) had been endowed with the beauty of his rival:  one or two of Plutarch’s touches upon the earlier history of Pompeius had netted her fancy, faintly (your generosity must be equal to hearing it) stung her blood; she liked the man; and if he had not been beaten in the end, she would have preferred him femininely.  His name was not written Pompey to her, as in English, to sound absurd:  it was a note of grandeur befitting great and lamentable fortunes, which the young lady declined to share solely because of her attraction to the victor, her compulsion to render unto the victor the sunflower’s homage.  She rendered it as a slave:  the splendid man beloved to ecstasy by the flower of Roman women was her natural choice.

Alvan could not be even a Caesar in person, he was a Jew.  Still a Jew of whom Count Kollin spoke so warmly must be exceptional, and of the exceptional she dreamed.  He might have the head of a Caesar.  She imagined a huge head, the cauldron of a boiling brain, anything but bright to the eye, like a pot always on the fire, black, greasy, encrusted, unkempt:  the head of a malicious tremendous dwarf.  Her hungry inquiries in a city where Alvan was well known, brought her full information of one who enjoyed a highly convivial reputation besides the influence of his political leadership; but no description of his aspect accompanied it, for where he was nightly to be met somewhere about the city, none thought of describing him, and she did not push that question because she had sketched him for herself, and rather wished, the more she heard of his genius, to keep him repulsive.  It appeared that his bravery was as well proved as his genius, and a brilliant instance of it had been given in the city not long since.  He had her ideas, and he won multitudes with them:  he was a talker, a writer, and an orator; and he was learned, while she could not pretend either to learning or to a flow of rhetoric.  She could prattle deliciously, at times pointedly, relying on her intuition to tell