o one another, enchanted at the profundity of their
own wisdom, schemers planning to make a fortune, politicians
arguing, amateurs of the fair sex telling highly-spiced anecdotes
of love and women--and amongst it all this sentence:

"The harmony of the spheres fills the spaces of infinity, and
if we hear it not, it is because, as Plato says, our ears are
stopped with earth."

Monsieur Tudesco consumed brandy-cherries in a very elegant way.
Then the waiter served two dantzigs in little glass cups. Jean
admired the translucent liquor dotted with golden sparkles, and
Monsieur Tudesco demanded two more. Then, raising his cup on
high:

"I drink to the health of Monsieur Servien, your venerable father,"
he cried. "He enjoys a green and flourishing old age, at least
I hope so; he is a man superior to his mechanic and mercantile
condition by the benevolence of his behaviour to needy men of
letters. And your respected aunt? She still knits stockings with
the same zeal as of yore? At least I hope so. A lady of an austere
virtue. I conjecture you are wishing to order another dantzig,
my young friend."

Jean looked about him. The dram-shop was transfigured; the casks
looked enormous with their taps splendidly glittering, and seemed
to stretch into infinity in a quivering, golden mist. But one
object was more monstrously magnified than all the rest, and
that was the Marquis Tudesco; the old man positively towered
as huge as the giant of a fairy-tale, and Jean looked for him
to do wonders.

Tudesco was smiling.

"You do not drink, my young friend," he resumed. "I conjecture
you are in love. Ah! love! love is at once the sweetest and the
bitterest thing on earth. I too have felt my heart beat for a
woman. But it is long years ago since I outlived that passion. I
am now an old man crushed under adverse fortune; but in happier
days there was at Rome a _diva_ of a beauty so magnificent and
a genius so enthralling that cardinals fought to the death at
the door of her box; well, sir, that sublime creature I have
pressed to my bosom, and I have been informed since that with her
last sigh she breathed my name. I am like an old ruined temple,
degraded by the passage of time and the violence of men's hands,
yet sanctified for ever by the goddess."

This tale, whether it recalled in exaggerated terms some commonplace
intrigue of his young days in Italy, or more likely was a pure
fiction based on romantic episodes he had read in nove