The energy with which he repulsed the proposition of an arrangement which
would admit of excuses on his part, served prudent Hafner, and the not
less prudent Ardea, as a signal for withdrawal. It was too evident to
the two men that no reconciliation would result from a collision of such
a madman with a personage so difficult as the most authorized of
Florent's proxies had shown himself to be. They then asked Gorka to
relieve them from their duty. They had too plausible an excuse in
Fanny's betrothal for Boleslas to refuse to release them. That
retirement was a second catastrophe. In his impatience to find other
seconds who would be firm, Gorka hastened to the Cercle de la Chasse.
Chance willed that he should meet with two of his comrades--a Marquis
Cibo, Roman, and a Prince Pietrapertoso, Neapolitan, who were assuredly
the best he could have chosen to hasten the simplest affair to its worst
consequences.

Those two young men of the best Italian families, both very intelligent,
very loyal and very good, belonged to that particular class which is to
be met with in Vienna, Madrid, St. Petersburg, as in Milan and in Rome,
of foreign club-men hypnotized by Paris. And what a Paris! That of
showy and noisy fetes, that which passes the morning in practising the
sports in fashion, the afternoons in racing, in frequenting fencing-
schools, the evening at the theatre and the night at the gaming-table!
That Paris which emigrates by turns, according to the season, to Monte
Carlo for the 'Tir aux Pigeons', to Deauville for the race week, to Aix-
les-Bains for the baccarat season; that Paris which has its own customs,
its own language, its own history, even its own cosmopolitanism, for it
exercises over certain minds, throughout Europe, so despotic a rule that
Cibo, for example, and his friend Pietrapertoso never opened a French
journal that was not Parisian.