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Updated: June 27, 2025
That impassioned protestation was so touching, the generous child's illusion was so sincere, that Alba pressed her hand with a deeper tenderness. When Alba found herself that evening with her friend Dorsenne, who again dined at Madame Steno's, she took him aside to relate to him the tragical scene, and to ask him: "Have you seen that pamphlet?" "To-day," said the writer.
Although Madame Steno's lover belonged to the class of excitable, nervous people who exaggerate their feelings by an unconscious wildness of tone and of manner, his face bore the traces of a trouble too deep not to be startling. Julien, who had seen him set out, three months before, so radiantly handsome, was struck by the change which had taken place during such a brief absence.
The road which leads from Transtevere runs along the river, which rolls through a plain strewn with ruins and indented with barren hills, its brackish water discolored from the sand and mud of the Apennines. Here groups of eucalyptus, there groups of pine parasols above some ruined walls, were all the vegetation which met Alba Steno's eye.
When the servant had given that letter to the Countess, saying that Madame Gorka excused herself on account of indisposition, Alba Steno's first impulse had been to enter her friend's room. "I will go to embrace her and to see if she has need of anything," she said.
He now felt coursing through his veins the lightness which all writers of his kind feel when they have labored on a work they believe good. "I have earned my evening," he added, still in a loud voice. "I must now dress and go to Madame Steno's. A good dinner at the doctor's. A half-hour's walk. The night promises to be divine.
I desire to know all. What is there at the bottom of this duel?" "What could there be but a woman?" interrupted Lydia, who put into the two last words more savage scorn than if she had publicly spit in Caterina Steno's face. But that fresh access of anger fell before the surprise caused her by Madame Gorka's reply. "What woman? I understand you still less than I did just now."
He dwelt upon Alba's manner that evening and the infamy of the anonymous letters written to Madame Steno's discarded lover and to her daughter. And after he had reported the mysterious quarrel which had suddenly arisen between Gorka and Chapron: "I, therefore, promised to be his second," he concluded, "because I believe it my absolute duty to do all I can to prevent the duel from taking place.
We spent the evening before last together at Countess Steno's; she talked to me of nothing but her desire to have the book on which the illustrious soldier, the great believer, had prayed. She told me of all her heroic resolutions. Later she went to buy it.
He dwelt upon Alba's manner that evening and the infamy of the anonymous letters written to Madame Steno's discarded lover and to her daughter. And after he had reported the mysterious quarrel which had suddenly arisen between Gorka and Chapron: "I, therefore, promised to be his second," he concluded, "because I believe it my absolute duty to do all I can to prevent the duel from taking place.
But the drama called forth by Madame Steno's infidelity, and finally by Gorka's rashness, would only expose to light the moral conditions which Dorsenne had foreseen without comprehending.
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