dvantage; to have allowed oneself to believe
in a sudden and irresistible affinity; to have pictured, under the
promptings of transient excitement, a love-adventure in an age when
romances are written precisely because they never happen; to have
dreamed of balconies, guitars, stratagems, and bolts, enwrapped in
Almaviva's cloak; and, after inditing a poem in fancy, to stop at the
door of a house of ill-fame, and, crowning all, to discern in Rosina's
bashfulness a reticence imposed by the police--is not all this, I say,
an experience familiar to many a man who would not own it?

The most natural feelings are those we are least willing to confess,
and among them is fatuity. When the lesson is carried no further, the
Parisian profits by it, or forgets it, and no great harm is done. But
this would hardly be the case with this foreigner, who was beginning to
think he might pay too dearly for his Paris education.

This personage was a Milanese of good family, exiled from his native
country, where some "liberal" pranks had made him an object of suspicion
to the Austrian Government. Count Andrea Marcosini had been welcomed in
Paris with the cordiality, essentially French, that a man always finds
there, when he has a pleasant wit, a sounding name, two hundred thousand
francs a year, and a prepossessing person. To such a man banishment
could but be a pleasure tour; his property was simply sequestrated, and
his friends let him know that after an absence of two years he might
return to his native land without danger.

After rhyming _crudeli affanni_ with _i miei tiranni_ in a dozen or so
of sonnets, and maintaining as many hapless Italian refugees out of his
own purse, Count Andrea, who was so unlucky as to be a poet, thought
himself released from patriotic obligations. So, ever since his arrival,
he had given himself up recklessly to the pleasures of every kind which
Paris offers _gratis_ to those who can pay for them. His talents and his
handsome person won him success among women, whom he adored collectively
as beseemed his years, but among whom he had not as yet distinguished a
chosen one. And indeed this taste was, in him, subordinate to those
for music and poetry which he had cultivated from his childhood; and
he thought success in these both more difficult and more glorious to
achieve than in affairs of gallantry, since nature had not inflicted on
him the obstacles men take most pride in defying.

A man, like many another