they have been to me for some time, and may you receive them in your
palace of Tor di Nona as faithful messengers of the grateful affection
felt for you by your companion of last winter.

PAUL BOURGET.

PARIS, November 16, 1892.

COSMOPOLIS

BOOK 1.

CHAPTER I. A DILETTANTE AND A BELIEVER

Although the narrow stall, flooded with heaped-up books and papers, left
the visitor just room enough to stir, and although that visitor was one
of his regular customers, the old bookseller did not deign to move from
the stool upon which he was seated, while writing on an unsteady desk.
His odd head, with its long, white hair, peeping from beneath a once
black felt hat with a broad brim, was hardly raised at the sound of
the opening and shutting of the door. The newcomer saw an emaciated,
shriveled face, in which, from behind spectacles, two brown eyes
twinkled slyly. Then the hat again shaded the paper, which the knotty
fingers, with their dirty nails, covered with uneven lines traced in
a handwriting belonging to another age, and from the thin, tall form,
enveloped in a greenish, worn-out coat, came a faint voice, the voice of
a man afflicted with chronic laryngitis, uttering as an apology, with a
strong Italian accent, this phrase in French:

"One moment, Marquis, the muse will not wait."

"Very well, I will; I am no muse. Listen to your inspiration
comfortably, Ribalta," replied, with a laugh, he whom the vendor of
old books received with such original unconstraint. He was evidently
accustomed to the eccentricities of the strange merchant. In Rome--for
this scene took place in a shop at the end of one of the most ancient
streets of the Eternal City, a few paces from the Place d'Espagne, so
well known to tourists--in the city which serves as a confluent for so
many from all points of the world, has not that sense of the odd been
obliterated by the multiplicity of singular and anomalous types stranded
and sheltering there? You will find there revolutionists like boorish
Ribalta, who is ending in a curiosity-shop a life more eventful than the
most eventful of the sixteenth century.

Descended from a Corsican family, this personage came to Rome when very
young, about 1835, and at first became a seminarist. On the point of
being ordained a priest, he disappeared only to return, in 1849,
so rabid a republican that he was outlawed at the time of the
reestablishment of the pontifical go