death, gathered some fruit. He tasted it, and he said to Cardinal
Castagna--playing on their two names, his being Peretti--"The pears are
spoiled. The Romans have had enough. They will soon eat chestnuts."
That family anecdote enchanted Justus Hafner. It seemed to him full of
the most delightful humor. He repeated it to his colleagues at the club,
to his tradesmen, to it mattered not whom. He did not even mistrust
Dorsenne's irony.

"I met Hafner this morning on the Corso," said the latter to Alba at one
of the soirees at the end of the month, "and I had my third edition of
the pleasantry on the pears and chestnuts. And then, as we took a few
steps in the same direction, he pointed out to me the Palais Bonaparte,
saying, 'We are also related to them.'.... Which means that a grand-
nephew of the Emperor married a cousin of Peppino.... I swear he thinks
he is related to Napoleon!.... He is not even proud of it. The
Bonapartes are nowhere when it is a question of nobility!.... I await
the time when he will blush."

"And I the time when he will be punished as he deserves," interrupted
Alba Steno, in a mournful voice. "He is insolently triumphant. But no.
....He will succeed.... If it be true that his fortune is one immense
theft, think of those he has ruined. In what can they believe in the
face of his infamous happiness?"

"If they are philosophers," replied Dorsenne, laughing still more gayly,
"this spectacle will cause them to meditate on the words uttered by one
of my friends: 'One can not doubt the hand of God, for it created the
world.' Do you remember a certain prayer-book of Montluc's?"

"The one which your friend Montfanon bought to vex the poor little