her off.
Let us strike off, too, Madame Gorka, the truthful creature who could
not even condescend to the smallest lie for a trinket which she desires.
It is that which renders her so easily deceived. What irony!... Let us
strike off Florent. He would allow himself to be killed, if necessary,
like a Mameluke at the door of the room where his genial brother-in-law
was dallying with the Countess.... Let us strike off the American
himself. I have met such a case, a lover weary of a mistress, denouncing
himself to her in order to be freed from his love-affair. But he was a
roue, and had nothing in common with this booby, who has a talent
for painting as an elephant has a trunk--what irony! He married this
octoroon to have money. But it was a base act which freed him from
commerce, and permitted him to paint all he wanted, as he wanted.
He allows Steno to love him because she is diabolically pretty,
notwithstanding her forty years, and then she is, in spite of all, a
real noblewoman, which flattered him. He has not one dollar's-worth of
moral delicacy in his heart. But he has an abundance of knavery.... Let
us, too, strike out his wife. She is such a veritable slave whom the
mere presence of a white person annihilates to such a degree that she
dares not look her husband in the face.... It is not Hafner. The sly
fox is capable of doing anything by cunning, but is he capable of
undertaking a useless and dangerous piece of rascality? Never.... Fanny
is a saint escaped from the Golden Legend, no matter what Montfanon
thinks! I have now reviewed the entire coterie.... I was about to forget
Alba.... It is too absurd even to think of her.... Too absurd? Why?"

Dorsenne was, on formulating that fantastic thought, upon the point of
retiring. He took up, as was his habit, one of the books on his table,
in order to read a few pages, when once in bed. He had thus within his
reach the works by which he strengthened his doctrine of intransitive
intellectuality; they were Goethe's Memoirs; a volume of George Sand's
correspondence, in which were the letters to Flaubert; the 'Discours de
la Methode' by Descartes, and the essay by Burckhart on the Renaissance.

But, after turning over the leaves of one of those volumes, he closed it
without having read twenty lines. He extinguished his lamp, but he could
not sleep. The strange suspicion which crossed his mind had something
monstrous about it, applied thus to a young girl. What a suspicion an