my heart."

"It is unequalled!" said Dorsenne, crumpling the letter with rising
anger. "He embraces me with all his heart. I am his most sincere friend!
I am chivalrous, French, the only person he esteems! What disagreeable
commission does he wish me to undertake for him? Into what scrape is he
about to ask me to enter, if he has not already got me into it? I know
that school of protestation. We are allied for life and death, are we
not? Do me a favor! And they upset your habits, encroach upon your
time, embark you in tragedies, and when you say 'No' to them-then they
squarely accuse you of selfishness and of treason! It is my fault, too.
Why did I listen to his confidences? Have I not known for years that a
man who relates his love-affairs on so short an acquaintance as ours is
a scoundrel and a fool? And with such people there can be no possible
connection. He amused me at the beginning, when he told me his sly
intrigue, without naming the person, as they all do at first. He amused
me still more by the way he managed to name her without violating that
which people in society call honor. And to think that the women believe
in that honor and that discretion! And yet it was the surest means of
entering Steno's, and approaching Alba.... I believe I am about to pay
for my Roman flirtation. If Gorka is a Pole, I am from Lorraine, and
the heir of the Castellans will only make me do what I agree to, nothing
more."

In such an ill-humor and with such a resolution, Julien reached the
door of his house. If that dwelling was not the palace alluded to by
Signorina Sabatina, it was neither the usually common house as common
today in new Rome as in contemporary Paris, modern Berlin, and in
certain streets of London opened of late in the neighborhood of Hyde
Park. It was an old building on the Place de la Trinite-des-Monts, at an
angle of the two streets Sistina and Gregoriana. Although reduced to the
state of a simple pension, more or less bourgeoise, that house had its
name marked in certain guide-books, and like all the corners of ancient
Rome it preserved the traces of a glorious, artistic history. The
small columns of the porch gave it the name of the tempietto, or little
temple, while several personages dear to litterateurs had lived there,
from the landscape painter Claude Lorrain to the poet Francois Coppee.
A few paces distant, almost opposite, lived Poussin, and one of the
greatest among modern English poets, Keats, died