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