anon, who had vainly warned the
old Bishop de Clermont against her whom he considered the most wily of
intriguers. For months vainly did she furnish proofs of her sincerity
of heart, the Cardinal reporting them in due season to the Marquis, who
persisted in discrediting them, and each fresh good deed of his enemy
augmented his hatred by aggravating the uneasiness which was caused him,
notwithstanding all, by a vague sense of his iniquity.

But Dorsenne no sooner turned toward the direction of the Palais
Castagna than he quickly forgot both Mademoiselle Hafner's and
Montfanon's prejudices, in thinking only of one sentence uttered by the
latter that which related to the return of Boleslas Gorka. The news was
unexpected, and it awakened in the writer such grave fears that he
did not even glance at the shop-window of the French bookseller at
the corner of the Corso to see if the label of the "Fortieth thousand"
flamed upon the yellow cover of his last book, the Eclogue Mondaine,
brought out in the autumn, with a success which his absence of six
months from Paris, had, however, detracted from. He did not even think
of ascertaining if the regimen he practised, in imitation of Lord Byron,
against embonpoint, would preserve his elegant form, of which he was so
proud, and yet mirrors were numerous on the way from the Place d'Espagne
to the Palais Castagna, which rears its sombre mass on the margin of the
Tiber, at the extremity of the Via Giulia, like a pendant of the Palais
Sacchetti, the masterwork of Sangallo. Dorsenne did not indulge in his
usual pastime of examining the souvenirs along the streets which met his
eye, and yet he passed in the twenty minutes which it took him to
reach his rendezvous a number of buildings teeming with centuries
of historical reminiscences. There was first of all the vast Palais
Borghese--the piano of the Borghese, as it has been called, from the
form of a clavecin adopted by the architect--a monument of splendor,
which was, less than two years later, to serve as the scene of a
situation more melancholy than that of the Palais Castagna.

Dorsenne had not an absent glance for the sumptuous building--he passed
unheeding the facade of St.-Louis, the object of Montfanon's admiration.
If the writer did not profess for that relic of ancient France the
piety of the Marquis, he never failed to enter there to pay his literary
respects to the tomb of Madame de Beaumont, to that 'quia non sunt' of
an epit