here was nothing more between her
and Maitland than Platonic discussions on the merits of Raphael and
Perugino.... And I should be more of a dupe than the other two for
missing the visit. It is not every day that one has a chance to see
auctioned, like a simple Bohemian, the grand-nephew of a pope."

The second suite of reflections resembled more than the first the real
Dorsenne, who was often incomprehensible even to his best friends. The
young man with the large, black eyes, the face with delicate features,
the olive complexion of a Spanish monk, had never had but one passion,
too exceptional not to baffle the ordinary observer, and developed in
a sense so singular that to the most charitable it assumed either an
attitude almost outrageous or else that of an abominable egotism and
profound corruption.

Dorsenne had spoken truly, he loved to comprehend--to comprehend as the
gamester loves to game, the miser to accumulate money, the ambitious to
obtain position--there was within him that appetite, that taste, that
mania for ideas which makes the scholar and the philosopher. But a
philosopher united by a caprice of nature to an artist, and by that of
fortune and of education to a worldly man and a traveller. The abstract
speculations of the metaphysician would not have sufficed for him, nor
would the continuous and simple creation of the narrator who narrates
to amuse himself, nor would the ardor of the semi-animal of the
man-of-pleasure who abandons himself to the frenzy of vice. He invented
for himself, partly from instinct, partly from method, a compromise
between his contradictory tendencies, which he formulated in a
fashion slightly pedantic, when he said that his sole aim was to
"intellectualize the forcible sensations;" in clearer terms, he dreamed
of meeting with, in human life, the greatest number of impressions it
could give and to think of them after having met them.

He thought, with or without reason, to discover in his two favorite
writers, Goethe and Stendhal, a constant application of a similar
principle. His studies had, for the past fourteen years when he had
begun to live and to write, passed through the most varied spheres
possible to him. But he had passed through them, lending his presence
without giving himself to them, with this idea always present in his
mind: that he existed to become familiar with other customs, to watch
other characters, to clothe other personages and the sensations which
v