longing to find the "happy mean;" in the case of
another, flight from distasteful memories. The life of the cosmopolite
can conceal all beneath the vulgarity of its whims, from snobbery
in quest of higher connections to swindling in quest of easier prey,
submitting to the brilliant frivolities of the sport, the sombre
intrigues of policy, or the sadness of a life which has been a failure.
Such a variety of causes renders at once very attractive and almost
impracticable the task of the author who takes as a model that
ever-changing society so like unto itself in the exterior rites
and fashions, so really, so intimately complex and composite in its
fundamental elements. The writer is compelled to take from it a series
of leading facts, as I have done, essaying to deduce a law which governs
them. That law, in the present instance, is the permanence of race.
Contradictory as may appear this result, the more one studies the
cosmopolites, the more one ascertains that the most irreducible idea
within them is that special strength of heredity which slumbers beneath
the monotonous uniform of superficial relations, ready to reawaken as
soon as love stirs the depths of the temperament. But there again a
difficulty, almost insurmountable, is met with. Obliged to concentrate
his action to a limited number of personages, the novelist can not
pretend to incarnate in them the confused whole of characters which the
vague word race sums up. Again, taking this book as an example, you and
I, my dear Primoli, know a number of Venetians and of English women,
of Poles and of Romans, of Americans and of French who have nothing
in common with Madame Steno, Maud and Boleslas Gorka, Prince d'Ardea,
Marquis Cibo, Lincoln Maitland, his brother-in-law, and the Marquis de
Montfanon, while Justus Hafner only represents one phase out of twenty
of the European adventurer, of whom one knows neither his religion,
his family, his education, his point of setting out, nor his point of
arriving, for he has been through various ways and means. My ambition
would be satisfied were I to succeed in creating here a group of
individuals not representative of the entire race to which they belong,
but only as possibly existing in that race--or those races. For several
of them, Justus Hafner and his daughter Fanny, Alba Steno, Florent
Chapron, Lydia Maitland, have mixed blood in their veins. May these
personages interest you, my dear friend, and become to you as real as