his sinister
comedy at which you are assisting, you, who know all, while your heart
does not revolt."

"Pardon, pardon!" interrupted Dorsenne, "it is not a question of that.
You wander on and you forget what you have just asked me.... What
pleasure do I find in the human mosaic which I have detailed to you? I
will tell you, and we will not talk of the morals, if you please, when we
are simply dealing with the intellect. I do not pride myself on being a
judge of human nature, sir leaguer; I like to watch and to study it, and
among all the scenes it can present I know of none more suggestive, more
peculiar, and more modern than this: You are in a salon, at a
dining-table, at a party like that to which I am going this morning. You
are with ten persons who all speak the same language, are dressed by the
same tailor, have read the same morning paper, think the same thoughts
and feel the same sentiments.... But these persons are like those I have
just enumerated to you, creatures from very different points of the world
and of history. You study them with all that you know of their origin and
their heredity, and little by little beneath the varnish of
cosmopolitanism you discover their race, irresistible, indestructible
race! In the mistress of the house, very elegant, very cultured, for
example, a Madame Steno, you discover the descendant of the Doges, the
patrician of the fifteenth century, with the form of a queen, strength in
her passion and frankness in her incomparable immorality; while in a
Florent Chapron or a Lydia you discover the primitive slave, the black
hypnotized by the white, the unfreed being produced by centuries of
servitude; while in a Madame Gorka you recognize beneath her smiling
amiability the fanaticism of truth of the Puritans; beneath the artistic
refinement of a Lincoln Maitland you find the squatter, invincibly coarse
and robust; in Boleslas Gorka all the nervous irritability of the Slav,
which has ruined Poland. These lineaments of race are hardly visible in
the civilized person, who speaks three or four languages fluently, who
has lived in Paris, Nice, Florence, here, that same fashionable,
monotonous life. But when passion strikes its blow, when the man is
stirred to his inmost depths, then occurs the conflict of
characteristics, more surprising when the people thus brought together
have come from afar: And that is why," he concluded with a laugh, "I have
spent six months in Rome without hardly h