They are so much accustomed to combining artificial characters with creations of their imaginations that they constantly fulfil an analogous need with regard to the individuals they know best.
They have some friend who is dear to them, whom they see almost daily, who hides nothing from them and from whom they hide nothing.

But if they speak to you of him you are surprised to find that, while continuing to love that friend, they trace to you in him two contradictory portraits with the same sincerity and the same probability.
They have a mistress, and that woman, even in the space sometimes of one day, sees them, with fear, change toward her, who has remained the same.
It is that they have developed in them to a very intense degree the imagination of the human soul, and that to observe is to them only a pretext to construe.

That infirmity had governed Julien from early maturity.

It was rarely manifested in a manner more unexpected than in the case of charming Alba Steno, who was possibly dreaming of him at the very moment when, in the silence of the night, he was forcing himself to prove that she was capable of that species of epistolary parricide.
"After all," he said to himself, for there is iconoclasm in the excessively intellectual, and they delight in destroying their dearest moral or sentimental idols, the better to prove their strength, "after all, have I really understood her relations toward her mother?
When I came to Rome in November, when I was to be presented to the Countess, what did not only one, but nine or ten persons tell me?
That Madame Steno had a liaison with the husband of her daughter's best friend, and that the little one was grieving about it.

I went to the house.