It has been the fashion to dismiss Pagello as a mere nincompoop. But if he had been that, a George Sand would not have cared a rap for him, and he would have been terrified by George. As it was, when she asked him to take her back to Paris he “chucked” his practice and cheerfully parted with his pictures and plate to provide funds for the journey. He was, at any rate, a disinterested lover; but the truth seems to be he was not passionate enough for George. “Pagello is an angel of virtue,” she writes to Musset, “he is so full of sensibility and so good ... he surrounds me with care and attention.... For the first time in my life I love without passion.... Well, for my part, I feel the need to suffer for some one. Oh! why couldn’t I live between the two of you and make you happy without belonging to either?” But by the time she had reached Paris she was already thinking of belonging to Alfred again, and “door-stepped” Pagello. Her Parisian set, of course, made fun of him. The poor gentleman’s situation was, indeed, sufficiently awkward. But it is not true, as it is the fashion to say, that he was “sent straight back.” George, who had retreated to Nohant, invited him there, but he had the good sense to decline. She was afraid he might be in want of money, and wrote to a friend, “he will never take it from a woman, even as a loan.” She, at any rate, knew he was a gentleman. But the Italians, with all their romantic traditions, are a practical people. Finding himself adrift in Paris, Pagello remembered his profession, and stayed on as long as he could to study surgery, with such substantial result that he subsequently became one of the chief surgeons in Italy, and gained a special reputation, it is said, in lithotomy. Thus may a fantastic love adventure be turned to good account. I take my facts about Pagello from Mme. Wladimir Karénine’s “George Sand” (1899-1912), the one authentic and exhaustive work on the subject. He died, over 90 years of age, after the first two of her three volumes were published, and what one likes most of all about him is that, till very near the end of his life, he kept his mouth tight shut about the great adventure of his youth. A mere nincompoop could not have done that. In 1881 the Italian Press happened to be reviving the story of the Venetian amour, and they succeeded in getting from Pagello a few of George’s letters and some modest, manly reminiscences. He had no piquant scandals to disclose, and merely showed, quite unconsciously, that he was far the most decent of the strange three involved in the Venetian adventure.