“‘An end of love! I am dead to all pleasure, to all human emotions!’
“As he spoke, he seized a hammer and hurled it at the statue with such excessive force that he missed it. He thought that he had destroyed that monument of his madness, and thereupon he drew his sword again, and raised it to kill the singer. Zambinella uttered shriek after shriek. Three men burst into the studio at that moment, and the sculptor fell, pieced by three daggers.
“‘From Cardinal Cicognara,’ said one of the men.
“‘A benefaction worthy of a Christian,’ retorted the Frenchman, as he breathed his last.
“These ominous emissaries told Zambinella of the anxiety of his patron, who was waiting at the door in a closed carriage in order to take him away as soon as he was set at liberty.”
“But,” said Madame de Rochefide, “what connection is there between this story and the little old man we saw at the Lantys’?”
“Madame, Cardinal Cicognara took possession of Zambinella’s statue and had it reproduced in marble; it is in the Albani Museum to-day. In 1794 the Lanty family discovered it there, and asked Vien to copy it. The portrait which showed you Zambinella at twenty, a moment after you had seen him as a centenarian, afterward figured in Girodet’s Endymion; you yourself recognized the type in Adonis.”
“But this Zambinella, male or female—”
“Must be, madame, Marianina’s maternal great uncle. You can conceive now Madame de Lanty’s interest in concealing the source of a fortune which comes—”
“Enough!” said she, with an imperious gesture.