m, repeating: "She shall not
have it. Listen.... And tell her plainly. She shall not have it!"

CHAPTER II. THE BEGINNING OF A DRAMA

"There is an intelligent man, who never questions his ideas," said
Dorsenne to himself, when the Marquis had left him. "He is like the
Socialists. What vigor of mind in that old wornout machine!" And for a
brief moment he watched, with a glance in which there was at least as
much admiration as pity, the Marquis, who was disappearing down the Rue
de la Propagande, and who walked at the rapid pace characteristic of
monomaniacs. They follow their thoughts instead of heeding objects.
However, the care he exercised in avoiding the sun's line for the shade
attested the instincts of an old Roman, who knew the danger of the first
rays of spring beneath that blue sky. For a moment Montfanon paused
to give alms to one of the numerous mendicants who abound in the
neighborhood of the Place d'Espagne, meritorious in him, for with his
one arm and burdened with the prayer-book it required a veritable effort
to search in his pocket. Dorsenne was well enough acquainted with that
original personage to know that he had never been able to say "no"
to any one who asked charity, great or small, of him. Thanks to that
system, the enemy of beautiful Fanny Hafner was always short of cash
with forty thousand francs' income and leading a simple existence.
The costly purchase of the relic of Montluc proved that the antipathy
conceived for Baron Justus's charming daughter had become a species of
passion. Under any other circumstances, the novelist, who delighted
in such cases, would not have failed to meditate ironically on that
feeling, easy enough of explanation. There was much more irrational
instinct in it than Montfanon himself suspected. The old leaguer would
not have been logical if he had not had in point of race an inquisition
partiality, and the mere suspicion of Jewish origin should have
prejudiced him against Fanny. But he was just, as Dorsenne had told him,
and if the young girl had been an avowed Jewess, living up zealously to
her religion, he would have respected but have avoided her, and he never
would have spoken of her with such bitterness.

The true motive of his antipathy was that he loved Cardinal Guerillot,
as was his habit in all things, with passion and with jealousy, and he
could not forgive Mademoiselle Hafner for having formed an intimacy with
the holy prelate in spite of him, Montf