Bourgonef’s story has been narrated with some fullness, though in less detail than he told it, in order that the reader may understand its real bearings on my story.  Without it, the motives which impelled the strange pertinacity of my pursuit would have been unintelligible.  I have said that a very disagreeable impression remained on my mind respecting certain aspects of his character, and I felt somewhat ashamed of my imperfect sagacity in having up to this period been entirely blind to those aspects.  The truth is, every human being is a mystery, and remains so to the last.  We fancy we know a character; we form a distinct conception of it; for years that conception remains unmodified, and suddenly the strain of some emergency, of the incidental stimulus of new circumstances, reveals qualities not simply unexpected, but flatly contradictory of our previous conception.  We judge of a man by the angle he subtends to our eye—­only thus can we judge of him; and this angle depends on the relation his qualities and circumstances bear to our interests and sympathies.  Bourgonef had charmed me intellectually; morally I had never come closer to him than in the sympathies of public questions and abstract theories.  His story had disclosed hidden depths.

My old suspicions reappeared, and a conversation we had two days afterwards helped to strengthen them.

We had gone on a visit to Schwanthaler, the sculptor, at his tiny little castle of Schwaneck, a few miles from Munich.  The artist was out for a walk, but we were invited to come in and await his return, which would be shortly; and meanwhile Bourgonef undertook to show me over the castle, interesting as a bit of modern Gothic, realizing on a diminutive scale a youthful dream of the sculptor’s.  When our survey was completed—­and it did not take long—­we sat at one of the windows and enjoyed a magnificent prospect.  “It is curious,” said Bourgonef, “to be shut up here in this imitation of medieval masonry, where every detail speaks of the dead past, and to think of the events now going on in Paris which must find imitators all over Europe, and which open to the mind such vistas of the future.  What a grotesque anachronism is this Gothic castle, built in the same age as that which sees a reforming pope!”

“Yes; but is not the reforming pope himself an anachronism?”

“As a Catholic,” here he smiled, intimating that his orthodoxy was not very stringent, “I cannot admit that; as a Protestant, you must admit that if there must be a pope, he must in these days be a reformer, or—­give up his temporal power.  Not that I look on Pio Nono as more than a precursor; he may break ground, and point the way, but he is not the man to lead Europe out of its present slough of despond, and under the headship of the Church found a new and lasting republic.  We want a Hildebrand, one who will be to the nineteenth century as Gregory was to the eleventh.”