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