bottom corner was an escutcheon surmounted by a ducal coronet. What struck me most, however, was that the costume, with the exception of the powder, was the same as that of my father's bacchante.
I still had the portrait in my hand when the marquise entered the room.
"Just like his father!" she exclaimed, as she came toward me. "Ah! those Frenchmen! those Frenchmen! Scarcely inside my door, and he already has his hand on Madame Lucréce!"
I was vehement in apologizing for my temerity and involved myself in a long eulogistic disquisition upon the chef d'œuvre of Leonardo that I had had the boldness to remove from its place.
"It is in fact a Leonardo," said the marquise, "and it is the portrait of the too famous Lucrezia Borgia. Your father used to admire it more than all the rest of my collection. But, good heavens! what a resemblance! It seems to me as if I were looking on your father as he was twenty-five years ago. How is he? What is he doing? Won't he come to Rome to see us some day?"
Although the marquise had neither powder in her hair nor tiger-skin upon her shoulders, I recognized in her my father's bacchante at the very first glance, by sheer force of genius. Twenty-five years or so had been unable completely to efface the traces of what had once been a great beauty. Her expression alone had changed, like her toilette. She was dressed all in black, and her triple chin, her sedate smile, her mingled air of cheerfulness and solemnity, told me that she was become devout.
Her reception of me, however, was as affectionate
