The costly
purchase of the relic of Montluc proved that the antipathy conceived for
Baron Justus's charming daughter had become a species of passion. Under
any other circumstances, the novelist, who delighted in such cases, would
not have failed to meditate ironically on that feeling, easy enough of
explanation. There was much more irrational instinct in it than Montfanon
himself suspected. The old leaguer would not have been logical if he had
not had in point of race an inquisition partiality, and the mere
suspicion of Jewish origin should have prejudiced him against Fanny. But
he was just, as Dorsenne had told him, and if the young girl had been an
avowed Jewess, living up zealously to her religion, he would have
respected but have avoided her, and he never would have spoken of her
with such bitterness.

The true motive of his antipathy was that he loved Cardinal Guerillot, as
was his habit in all things, with passion and with jealousy, and he could
not forgive Mademoiselle Hafner for having formed an intimacy with the
holy prelate in spite of him, Montfanon, who had vainly warned the old
Bishop de Clermont against her whom he considered the most wily of
intriguers. For months vainly did she furnish proofs of her sincerity of
heart, the Cardinal reporting them in due season to the Marquis, who
persisted in discrediting them, and each fresh good deed of his enemy
augmented his hatred by aggravating the uneasiness which was caused him,
notwithstanding all, by a vague sense of his iniquity.

But Dorsenne no sooner turned toward the direction of the Palais Castagna
than he quickly forgot both Mademoiselle Hafner's and Montfanon's
prejudices, in thinking only of one sentence uttered by the latter that
which related to the return of Boleslas Gorka. The news was unexpected,
and it awakened in the writer such grave fears that he did not even
glance at the shop-window of the French bookseller at the corner of the
Corso to see if the label of the "Fortieth thousand" flamed upon the
yellow cover of his last book, the Eclogue Mondaine, brought out in the
autumn, with a success which his absence of six months from Paris, had,
however, detracted from. He did not even think of ascertaining if the
regimen he practised, in imitation of Lord Byron, against embonpoint,
would preserve his elegant form, of which he was so proud, and yet
mirrors were numerous on the way from the Place d'Espagne to the Palais
Castagna, which rears its somb