"Listen, monseigneur." "I pray you, do not call me monseigneur; it is too ceremonious." "Oh, oh, monseigneur; it is a great favour for a prince to be treated with familiarity; he must deserve it. You ask me how you may please me. I will give you not an example, but a fact. The poet, Moser-Hartmann, whose apostasy you say I caused, addressed to me the most singular remark in the world. One day he met me at the house of a mutual friend, looked at me a long time, and then said, with an air of angry alarm: 'Madame, for the peace of spirituality, you ought to be buried alive!' And he went out, but next day he came to see me, madly in love, a victim, he told me, to a sudden passion,--as sudden and novel as it was uncontrollable. 'Let your passion burn,' I said to him, 'but hear the advice of a friend; the passion devours you, let it flow in your verse. Become a great poet, and perhaps your glory will intoxicate me.'" "And did the inebriation ever come to you?" said the prince. "No, but glory has come to my lover to console him, and a poet can be consoled for the loss of everything by glory. Ah, well, monseigneur, have I used my influence well or ill?" Suddenly the archduke started. A keen suspicion pierced his heart. Dissimulating this painful doubt, he said to Madeleine, with a forced smile: "But, madame, your adventure with the cardinal legate did not have so happy an end for him. What is left to console him?" "There rests with him the consciousness of having delivered a country that abhorred him from his presence," replied Madeleine, gaily. "Is there nothing in that, monseigneur?" "Come now, between us, what interest had you in making this unhappy man the victim of a terrible scandal?" "How! What interest, monseigneur? What but the interest of unmasking an infamous hypocrite, of chasing him out of a city that he oppressed,--in short, to cover him with contempt and shame. 'I believe in your passion,' said I to him, 'and perhaps I may share it if you will mask as a Hungarian hussar, and come with me to the ball of the Rialto, my dear cardinal; it is an extravagant, foolish caprice on my part, no doubt, but that is my condition, and, besides, who will recognise you under the mask?' This horrible priest had his head turned; he accepted, and I destroyed him."