t, assassinate, but have carriages
perfectly appointed, a magnificent mansion, well-served dinners, and
fine clothes!... No, I have suffered too much! Ah, it is not right; and
on what a day, too? God! That the old man might die!".... he added, in a
voice so low that his companion did not hear his words.

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