Cosmopolis — Complete. Paul Bourget

the more painful to him because it was at once true and untrue. How should he explain the sort of literary alchemy, thanks to which he was enabled to affirm that he never drew portraits, although not a line of his fifteen volumes was traced without a living model? He replied, therefore, with a touch of ill-humor:

      “You are mistaken, my dear Baron. I do not make notes on persons.”

      “All authors say that,” answered the Baron, shrugging his shoulders with the assumed good-nature which so rarely forsook him, “and they are right. … At any rate, it is fortunate that you had something to write, for we shall both be late in arriving at a rendezvous where there are ladies. … It is almost a quarter past eleven, and we should have been there at eleven precisely. … But I have one excuse, I waited for my daughter.”

      “And she has not come?” asked Dorsenne.

      “No,” replied Hafner, “at the last moment she could not make up her mind. She had a slight annoyance this morning—I do not know what old book she had set her heart on. Some rascal found out that she wanted it, and he obtained it first. … But that is not the true cause of her absence. The true cause is that she is too sensitive, and she finds it so sad that there should be a sale of the possessions of this ancient family. … I did not insist. What would she have experienced had she known the late Princess Nicoletta, Pepino’s mother? When I came to Rome on a visit for the first time, in ’75, what a salon that was and what a Princess! … She was a Condolmieri, of the family of Eugene IV.”

      “How absurd vanity renders the most refined man,” thought Julien, suiting his pace to the Baron’s. “He would have me believe that he was received at the house of that woman who was politically the blackest of the black, the most difficult to please in the recruiting of her salon. … Life is more complex than the Montfanons even know of! This girl feels by instinct that which the chouan of a marquis feels by doctrine, the absurdity of this striving after nobility, with a father who forgets the broker and who talks of the popes of the Middle Ages as of a trinket! … While we are alone, I must ask this old fox what he knows of Boleslas Gorka’s return. He is the confidant of Madame Steno. He should be informed of the doings and whereabouts of the Pole.”

      The friendship of Baron Hafner for the Countess, whose financial adviser he was, should have been for Dorsenne a reason for avoiding such a subject, the more so as he was convinced of the man’s dislike for him. The Baron could, by a single word perfidiously repeated, injure him very much with Alba’s mother. But the novelist, similar on that point to the majority of professional observers, had only the power of analysis of a retrospective order. Never had his keen intelligence served him to avoid one of those slight errors of conversation which are important mistakes on the pitiful checker-board of life. Happily for him, he cherished no ambition except for his pleasure and his art, without which he would have found the means of making for himself, gratuitously, enough enemies to clear all the academies.

      He, therefore, chose the moment when the Baron arrived at the landing on the first floor, pausing somewhat out of breath, and after the agent had verified their passes, to say to his companion:

      “Have you seen Gorka since his arrival?”

      “What? Is Boleslas here?” asked Justus Hafner, who manifested his astonishment in no other manner than by adding: “I thought he was still in Poland.”

      “I have not seen him myself,” said Dorsenne. He already regretted having spoken too hastily. It is always more prudent not to spread the first report. But the ignorance of that return of Countess Steno’s best friend, who saw her daily, struck the young man with such surprise that he could not resist adding: “Some one, whose veracity I can not doubt, met him this morning.” Then, brusquely: “Does not this sudden return make you fearful?”

      “Fearful?” repeated the Baron. “Why so?” As he uttered those words he glanced at the writer with his usual impassive expression, which, however, a very slight sign, significant to those who knew him, belied. In exchanging those few words the two men had passed into the first room of “objects of art,” having belonged to the apartment of “His Eminence Prince d’Ardea,” as the catalogue said, and the Baron did not raise the gold glass which he held at the end of his nose when near the smallest display of bric-a-brac, as was his custom. As he walked slowly through the collection of busts and statues of that first room, called “Marbles” on the catalogue, without glancing with the eye of a practised judge at the Gobelin tapestry upon the walls, it must have been that he considered as very grave the novelist’s revelation. The latter had said too much not to continue:

      “Well, I who have not been connected with Madame Steno for years, like you, trembled for her when that return was announced to me. She does not know what Gorka is when he is jealous, or of what he is capable.”

      “Jealous? Of whom?” interrupted Hafner. “It is not the first time I have heard the name of Boleslas uttered in connection with the Countess. I confess I have never taken those words seriously, and I should not have thought that you, a frequenter of her salon, one of her friends, would hesitate on that subject. Rest assured, Gorka is in love with his charming wife, and he could not make a better choice. Countess Caterina is an excellent person, very Italian. She is interested in him, as in you, as in Maitland, as in me; in you because you write such admirable books, in Maitland because he paints like our best masters, in Boleslas on account of the sorrow he had in the death of his first child, in me because I have so delicate a charge. She is more than an excellent person, she is a truly superior woman, very superior.” He uttered his hypocritical speech with such perfect ease that Dorsenne was surprised and irritated. That Hafner did not believe one treacherous word of what he said the novelist was sure, he who, from the indiscreet confidences of Gorka, knew what to think of the Venetian’s manner, and he; too, understood the Baron’s glance! At any other time he would have admired the policy of the old stager. At that moment the novelist was vexed by it, for it caused him to play a role, very common but not very elevating, that of a calumniator, who has spoken ill of a woman with whom he dined the day before. He, therefore, quickened his pace as much as politeness would permit, in order not to remain tete-a-tete with the Baron, and also to rejoin the persons of their party already arrived.

      They emerged from the first room to enter a second, marked “Porcelain;” then a third, “Frescoes of Perino del Vaga,” on account of the ceiling upon which the master painted a companion to his vigorous piece at Genoa—“Jupiter crushing the Giants”—and, lastly, into a fourth, called “The Arazzi,” from the wonderful panels with which it was decorated.

      A few visitors were lounging there, for the season was somewhat advanced, and the date which M. Ancona had chosen for the execution proved either the calculation of profound hatred or else the adroit ruse of a syndicate of retailers. All the magnificent objects in the palace were adjudged at half the value they would have brought a few months sooner or later. The small group of curios stood out in contrast to the profusion of furniture, materials, objects of art of all kinds, which filled the vast rooms. It was the residence of five hundred years of power and of luxury, where masterpieces, worthy of the great Medicis, and executed in their time, alternated with the gewgaws of the eighteenth century and bronzes of the First Empire, with silver trinkets ordered but yesterday in London. Baron Justus could not resist these. He raised his glass and called Dorsenne to show him a curious armchair, the carving of a cartel, the embroidery on some material. One glance sufficed for him to judge. … If the novelist had been capable of observing, he would have perceived in the detailed knowledge the banker had of the catalogue the trace of a study too deep not to accord with some mysterious project.

      “There are treasures here,” said he. “See these two Chinese vases with convex lids, with the orange ground decorated with gilding. Those are pieces no longer made in China. It is a lost art. And this tete-a-tete decorated with flowers; and this pluvial cope in this case. What a marvel! It is as good as the one of Pius Second, which was at Pienza and which has been stolen. I could have bought it at one time for fifteen hundred francs. It is worth fifteen thousand, twenty thousand, all of that. Here is some faience. It was brought from Spain when Cardinal Castagna came from Madrid, when he took the place of Pius Fifth as sponsor of Infanta Isabella. Ah, what treasures! But you go like the wind,”