From "Under The Rose" in Slow Learner:

"An alignment like this, he felt, could only have taken place in a Western World where spying was becoming less an individual than a group enterprise, where the events of 1848 and the activities of anarchists and radicals all over the Continent seemed to proclaim that history was being made no longer through the Virtù of single princes but rather by man in the mass; by trends and tendencies and impersonal curves on a lattice of pale blue lines. [...] For he and Moldweorp [who works nominally for the Germans], Porpentine knew, were cut from the same pattern: comrade Machiavellians, still playing the games of Renaissance Italian politics in a world that had outgrown them." (p.107)

"It was no longer single combat. Had it ever been? Lepsius, Bongo-Shaftsbury, all the others, had been more than merely tools or physical extensions of Moldweorp. They were all in it; all had a stake, acted as a unit. Under orders. Whose orders? Anything human? He doubted: like a bright hallucination against Cairo's night-sky he saw (it may have been only a line of clouds) a bell-shaped curve, remembered perhaps from some younger F.O. operative's mathematics text. Unlike Constantine on the verge of battle, he could not afford, this late, to be converted at any sign. Only curse himself, silent, for wanting so to believe in a fight according to the duello, even in this period of history. But they — no, it — had not been playing those rules. Only statistical odds. When had he stopped facing an adversary and taken on a Force, a Quantity?" (pp.134-35)

Manon Lescaut References in "Under The Rose"

"[Porpentine]would remain instead an inept Cremonini singing Des Grieux, expressing certain passions by calculated musical covenant, would never leave a stage where vehemences and tendresses are merely forte and piano, where the Paris gate at Amiens foreshortens mathematically and is illuminated by the precise glow of calcium light." (p.118)

"The postilion horn of the diligence was heard. The coach came rattling and creaking into the inn courtyard." (p.132-33)

"He was no Des Grieux. Des Grieux knows, soon as he sees that young lady just off the diligence from Arras, what will happen. He does not make false starts or feints, this chevalier, has nothing to decode, no double game to play. Porpentine envied him." (p.128)

"On stage Edmondo and the students chaffed the Romantic, horny Des Grieux. [...] Manon was helped down from the coach. Des Grieux gaped, was transfixed, read his destiny on her eyes." (pp.132-33)

"Like Des Grieux he must have his delusion even now; could never admit himself entirely a gull." (p.136)

"Now Porpentine had performed his own fatal act of love or charity by screaming at the Chief. The two--act and betrayal--cancel out. Canceled to zero. Did they always? Oh God. He turned again to Moldweorp.
"His Manon?" (p.137)

Sir Alastair Wren

"Mildred was in Egypt, she soon informed Porpentine, to gather rock specimens, being daft for rocks in the same way Sir Alastair was for large and ancient pipe-organs. He had toured Germany the previous year, alienating the populations of various cathedral towns by recruiting small boys to toil away half-days at a clip keeping the bellows going: and then underpaying. Frightfully, added Victoria. There was, he continued, no decent pipe-organ anywhere on the African continent [...]." (p.110)

"At the next corner [Porpentine] noticed a church off to his right; heard loud organ music. On a sudden whim he entered the church. Sure enough, it was Sir Alastair, booming away. It took the unmusical Porpentine some five minutes to come aware of the devastation Sir Alastair was wreaking on the keys and pedals. Music laced the interior of the tiny, Gothic house with certain intricate veinings, weird petal-shapes. But it was violent and somehow Southern foliage. Head and fingers uncontrollable for a neglect of his daughter's or any purity, for the music's own shape, for Bach — was it Bach? — himself?" (pp.128-29)