Excerpt from Cosmopolis: A Novel
I send you, my dear friend, from beyond the Alps, the romance of international life that was begun in Italy almost under your eyes, which I have framed in that old and noble Rome of which you are so ardent a lover. Certainly, the drama of passion unfolded in this book has nothing else especially Roman, and nothing was farther from my thoughts than to trace a picture of a society so local, so traditional as that which stirs between the Quirinal and the Vatican. The drama is not even Italian, for it could not, with any degree of probability, develop itself in Venice or in Florence. Nice would have suited equally well, and St. Moritz, not to mention Paris and London - in fact, the various cities which are, as it were, quarters scattered throughout Europe, of that, floating Cosmopolis baptized by Beyle: Vengo adesso da Cosmopoli. It is the contrast between the somewhat incoherent ways and doings of the wanderers of high life, and the character of perennial existence stamped everywhere in the great city of the C?sars and the Popes, that led me to choose this spot, where the smallest corners speak of a past of centuries, for evoking in it some representatives of that mode of life, which is the most modern, and also the most arbitrary and most momentary. You, who know better than anyone the odd world of the Cosmopolites, will understand why I have confined myself here to depicting a max fragment, as I would, had occasion allowed, have told only an episode.
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