from commerce, and permitted him to
paint all he wanted, as he wanted. He allows Steno to love him because
she is diabolically pretty, notwithstanding her forty years, and then she
is, in spite of all, a real noblewoman, which flattered him. He has not
one dollar's-worth of moral delicacy in his heart. But he has an
abundance of knavery.... Let us, too, strike out his wife. She is such a
veritable slave whom the mere presence of a white person annihilates to
such a degree that she dares not look her husband in the face.... It is
not Hafner. The sly fox is capable of doing anything by cunning, but is
he capable of undertaking a useless and dangerous piece of rascality?
Never.... Fanny is a saint escaped from the Golden Legend, no matter what
Montfanon thinks! I have now reviewed the entire coterie.... I was about
to forget Alba.... It is too absurd even to think of her.... Too absurd?
Why?"

Dorsenne was, on formulating that fantastic thought, upon the point of
retiring. He took up, as was his habit, one of the books on his table, in
order to read a few pages, when once in bed. He had thus within his reach
the works by which he strengthened his doctrine of intransitive
intellectuality; they were Goethe's Memoirs; a volume of George Sand's
correspondence, in which were the letters to Flaubert; the 'Discours de
la Methode' by Descartes, and the essay by Burckhart on the Renaissance.

But, after turning over the leaves of one of those volumes, he closed it
without having read twenty lines. He extinguished his lamp, but he could
not sleep. The strange suspicion which crossed his mind had something
monstrous about it, applied thus to a young girl. What a suspicion and
what a young girl! The preferred friend of his entire winter, she on
whose account he had prolonged his stay in Rome, for she was the most
graceful vision of delicacy and of melancholy in the framework of a
tragical and solemn past. Any other than Dorsenne would not have admitted
such an idea without being inspired with horror. But Dorsenne, on the
contrary, suddenly began to dive into that sinister hypothesis, to help
it forward, to justify it. No one more than he suffered from a moral
deformity which the abuse of a certain literary work inflicts on some
writers. They are so much accustomed to combining artificial characters
with creations of their imaginations that they constantly fulfil an
analogous need with regard to the individuals they know best. They hav