"'I am nothing at all in myself; but I should be even less had I not a venerable past to lean upon. I am overborne by the apathy natural to minds devoid of inspiration; but my father taught me one thing which passed from his blood into mine: that I come of a distinguished family, and that if I could do nothing to renew its splendor, I should, at all events, abstain from tastes and ideas which might tarnish it. In default of genius, I have respect for family tradition, and, having no ground for pride in myself, I repair the wrong which my nullity might inflict upon my ancestors by bestowing a sort of adoration upon them. I should be a hundred times more guilty if, caring naught for my ignorance, I should shatter their images and profane their memory by airs of contempt. To deny one's father because one cannot equal him is the act of a fool or a dastard. On the other hand, it is a pious duty to invoke his memory in order to obtain forgiveness for being less eminent than he; and the artists with whom I consort and to whom I have no works of my own to show, listen to me with interest, at all events, when I speak to them of the works of my ancestors.' "That is the answer you would make to me, Michel, and do you think that it would have no effect upon me? It seems to me that if I were the poor, abandoned child that I have imagined, I should fall into profound melancholy, and should complain of fate for having dropped me upon the earth alone, and, so to speak, without sponsors. "But I pass to a less ponderous apologue, and one better adapted to your artistic imagination, which, however, I beg you will interrupt immediately if you have already heard it. The anecdote has been attributed to several persons cut after the pattern of Don Juan, and as old stories are rejuvenated from generation to generation, it has been told recently of Cæsar de Castro-Reale, the _Destatore_, the famous brigand, who was no ordinary man either in good or evil. "At Palermo, in the days when he sought to deaden his faculties in wild dissipation, uncertain whether he should succeed in making a perfect brute of himself, or should decide to raise the standard of rebellion, it is said that he went one evening to visit a venerable palace which he had just lost at play, and which he wished to see once more before leaving it never to return. It was the last remnant of his fortune, and perhaps the only thing which caused him the slightest regret; for it was there that he had passed his early years, there that his parents had died, there that the portraits of his ancestors were buried in the dust of long neglect. "He went there to notify his steward to receive on the morrow, as the proprietor of the estate, the nobleman who had won it on a cast of the dice.--'What,' said the steward, who, like Master Barbagallo, had a profound respect for family traditions and portraits; 'you have staked everything, even your father's grave, even the portraits of your ancestors?'