“No,” replied Hafner, “at the last moment she could not make up her mind. She had a slight annoyance this morning--I do not know what old book she had set her heart on. Some rascal found out that she wanted it, and he obtained it first.... But that is not the true cause of her absence. The true cause is that she is too sensitive, and she finds it so sad that there should be a sale of the possessions of this ancient family.... I did not insist. What would she have experienced had she known the late Princess Nicoletta, Pepino’s mother? When I came to Rome on a visit for the first time, in ‘75, what a salon that was and what a Princess!... She was a Condolmieri, of the family of Eugene IV.” “How absurd vanity renders the most refined man,” thought Julien, suiting his pace to the Baron’s. “He would have me believe that he was received at the house of that woman who was politically the blackest of the black, the most difficult to please in the recruiting of her salon.... Life is more complex than the Montfanons even know of! This girl feels by instinct that which the chouan of a marquis feels by doctrine, the absurdity of this striving after nobility, with a father who forgets the broker and who talks of the popes of the Middle Ages as of a trinket!... While we are alone, I must ask this old fox what he knows of Boleslas Gorka’s return. He is the confidant of Madame Steno. He should be informed of the doings and whereabouts of the Pole.” The friendship of Baron Hafner for the Countess, whose financial adviser he was, should have been for Dorsenne a reason for avoiding such a subject, the more so as he was convinced of the man’s dislike for him. The Baron could, by a single word perfidiously repeated, injure him very much with Alba’s mother. But the novelist, similar on that point to the majority of professional observers, had only the power of analysis of a retrospective order. Never had his keen intelligence served him to avoid one of those slight errors of conversation which are important mistakes on the pitiful checker-board of life. Happily for him, he cherished no ambition except for his pleasure and his art, without which he would have found the means of making for himself, gratuitously, enough enemies to clear all the academies. He, therefore, chose the moment when the Baron arrived at the landing on the first floor, pausing somewhat out of breath, and after the agent had verified their passes, to say to his companion: “Have you seen Gorka since his arrival?” “What? Is Boleslas here?” asked Justus Hafner, who manifested his astonishment in no other manner than by adding: “I thought he was still in Poland.”