Dorsenne did not indulge in his usual pastime of examining the souvenirs along the streets which met his eye, and yet he passed in the twenty minutes which it took him to reach his rendezvous a number of buildings teeming with centuries of historical reminiscences.

There was first of all the vast Palais Borghese--the piano of the Borghese, as it has been called, from the form of a clavecin adopted by the architect--a monument of splendor, which was, less than two years later, to serve as the scene of a situation more melancholy than that of the Palais Castagna.
Dorsenne had not an absent glance for the sumptuous building--he passed unheeding the facade of St.-Louis, the object of Montfanon's admiration.
If the writer did not profess for that relic of ancient France the piety of the Marquis, he never failed to enter there to pay his literary respects to the tomb of Madame de Beaumont, to that 'quia non sunt' of an epitaph which Chateaubriand inscribed upon her tombstone, with more vanity, alas, than tenderness.

For the first time Dorsenne forgot it; he forgot also to gaze with delight upon the rococo fountain on the Place Navonne, that square upon which Domitian had his circus, and which recalls the cruel pageantries of imperial Rome.

He forgot, too, the mutilated statue which forms the angle of the Palais Braschi, two paces farther--two paces still farther, the grand artery of the Corso Victor-Emmanuel demonstrated the effort at regeneration of present Rome; two paces farther yet, the Palais Farnese recalls the grandeur of modern art, and the tragedy of contemporary monarchies.

Does not the thought of Michelangelo seem to be still imprinted on the sombre cross-beam of that immense sarcophagus, which was the refuge of the last King of Naples?
But it requires a mind entirely free to give one's self up to the charm of historical dilettanteism which cities built upon the past conjure up, and although Julien prided himself, not without reason, on being above emotion, he was not possessed of his usual independence of mind during the walk which took him to his "human mosaic," as he picturesquely expressed it, and he pondered and repondered the following questions: "Boleslas Gorka returned?
And two days ago I saw his wife, who did not expect him until next month.