The strange suspicion which crossed his mind had something monstrous about it, applied thus to a young girl.

What a suspicion and what a young girl! The preferred friend of his entire winter, she on whose account he had prolonged his stay in Rome, for she was the most graceful vision of delicacy and of melancholy in the framework of a tragical and solemn past.

Any other than Dorsenne would not have admitted such an idea without being inspired with horror.

But Dorsenne, on the contrary, suddenly began to dive into that sinister hypothesis, to help it forward, to justify it.

No one more than he suffered from a moral deformity which the abuse of a certain literary work inflicts on some writers.