should be more of a dupe than the other two for missing the visit.
It is not every day that one has a chance to see auctioned, like a simple
Bohemian, the grand-nephew of a pope."

The second suite of reflections resembled more than the first the real
Dorsenne, who was often incomprehensible even to his best friends. The
young man with the large, black eyes, the face with delicate features,
the olive complexion of a Spanish monk, had never had but one passion,
too exceptional not to baffle the ordinary observer, and developed in a
sense so singular that to the most charitable it assumed either an
attitude almost outrageous or else that of an abominable egotism and
profound corruption.

Dorsenne had spoken truly, he loved to comprehend--to comprehend as the
gamester loves to game, the miser to accumulate money, the ambitious to
obtain position--there was within him that appetite, that taste, that
mania for ideas which makes the scholar and the philosopher. But a
philosopher united by a caprice of nature to an artist, and by that of
fortune and of education to a worldly man and a traveller. The abstract
speculations of the metaphysician would not have sufficed for him, nor
would the continuous and simple creation of the narrator who narrates to
amuse himself, nor would the ardor of the semi-animal of the man-of-
pleasure who abandons himself to the frenzy of vice. He invented for
himself, partly from instinct, partly from method, a compromise between
his contradictory tendencies, which he formulated in a fashion slightly
pedantic, when he said that his sole aim was to "intellectualize the
forcible sensations;" in clearer terms, he dreamed of meeting with, in
human life, the greatest number of impressions it could give and to think
of them after having met them.