and robust; in Boleslas Gorka all the nervous irritability of the Slav,
which has ruined Poland. These lineaments of race are hardly visible in
the civilized person, who speaks three or four languages fluently, who
has lived in Paris, Nice, Florence, here, that same fashionable,
monotonous life. But when passion strikes its blow, when the man is
stirred to his inmost depths, then occurs the conflict of
characteristics, more surprising when the people thus brought together
have come from afar: And that is why," he concluded with a laugh, "I have
spent six months in Rome without hardly having seen a Roman, busy,
observing the little clan which is so revolting to you. It is probably
the twentieth I have studied, and I shall no doubt study twenty more, for
not one resembles another. Are you indulgently inclined toward me, now
that you have got even with me in making me hold forth at this corner,
like the hero of a Russian novel? Well, now adieu."

Montfanon had listened to the discourse with an inpenetrable air. In the
religious solitude in which he was awaiting the end, as he said, nothing
afforded him greater pleasure than the discussion of ideas. But he was
inspired by the enthusiasm of a man who feels with extreme ardor, and
when he was met by the partly ironical dilettanteism of Dorsenne he was
almost pained by it, so much the more so as the author and he had some
common theories, notably an extreme fancy for heredity and race. A sort
of discontented grimace distorted his expressive face. He clicked his
tongue in ill-humor, and said:

"One more question!.... And the result of all that, the object? To what
end does all this observation lead you?"

"To what should it lead me? To comprehend, as I have told you," replied
Dorsenne.