alsehood
Words are nothing; it is the tone in which they are uttered

COSMOPOLIS

By PAUL BOURGET

BOOK 3.

CHAPTER VII

A LITTLE RELATIVE OF IAGO

The remorse which Montfanon expressed so naively, once acknowledged to
himself, increased rapidly in the honest man's heart. He had reason to
say from the beginning that the affair looked bad. A quarrel, together
with assault, or an attempt at assault, would not be easily set right. It
required a diplomatic miracle. The slightest lack of self-possession on
the part of the seconds is equivalent to a catastrophe. As happens in
such circumstances, events are hurried, and the pessimistic anticipations
of the irritable Marquis were verified almost as soon as he uttered them.
Dorsenne and he had barely left the Palais Savorelli when Gorka arrived.
The energy with which he repulsed the proposition of an arrangement which
would admit of excuses on his part, served prudent Hafner, and the not
less prudent Ardea, as a signal for withdrawal. It was too evident to the
two men that no reconciliation would result from a collision of such a
madman with a personage so difficult as the most authorized of Florent's
proxies had shown himself to be. They then asked Gorka to relieve them
from their duty. They had too plausible an excuse in Fanny's betrothal
for Boleslas to refuse to release them. That retirement was a second
catastrophe. In his impatience to find other seconds who would be firm,
Gorka hastened to the Cercle de la Chasse. Chance willed that he should
meet with two of his comrades--a Marquis Cibo, Roman, and a Prince
Pietrapertoso, Neapolitan, who were assuredly the best he could have
chosen to hasten the simplest affair to its worst consequences.

Those two young men of the best Italian families, both very intelligent,
very loyal and very good, belonged to that particular class which is to
be met with in Vienna, Madrid, St. Petersburg, as in Milan and in Rome,
of foreign club-men hypnotized by Paris. And what a Paris! That of showy
and noisy fetes, that which passes the morning in practising the sports
in fashion, the afternoons in racing, in frequenting fencing-schools, the
evening at the theatre and the night at the gaming-table! That Paris
which emigrates by turns, according to the season, to Monte Carlo for the
'Tir aux Pigeons', to Deauville for the race week, to Aix-les-Bains for
the baccarat season; that Paris which has its own customs, its o