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Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
I was at supper when he arrived. He ordered another plate, and a
bottle of wine; he was gay, excited, his eyes were brilliant, and he
seemed quite to have forgotten my escapades in Paris, for he never
referred to them. He had only come for an hour, to see how I was
getting on, so he said; but he stayed three, for after supper he
called Joubert, and they both went out into the night.
These two old soldiers must have had something very important to
say to one another, for they were gone an hour or more. When they
returned, my father beckoned me to him and kissed me, and bade
me good-night; then, as if something had suddenly occurred to him,
he said to Joubert: "Patrick can come down to the road and see me
off. Come, both of you, and bring a lantern."
Joubert lit a lantern. The night was black as black velvet, and the
lantern only showed Joubert's legging-clad legs as he marched
before us down the gravel of the drive.
The carriage was standing in the road. My father kissed me, got in,
and drove away.
Just as the vehicle moved off, he looked out of the window, and the
light of the lantern which Joubert was holding up struck his face.
What a reckless, daring, jolly face it was, that face I was destined
never to see again!
"What did father want to say to you, Joubert?" I asked as we
returned to the pavilion.
"What did he want to say?" cried Joubert, whose temper seemed
sharper than usual. "Why, that the price of cabbages has gone up.
What else would he have to say to me at this hour of the night?
Mordieu! If I could be there!"
"Where, Joubert?"
But Joubert did not reply.
Next morning the fine weather still held, and I was up at dawn. It
was no trouble to get up early when one lived in the pavilion. The
birds wakened one; and, then, the forest!
In the very early morning, the forest, like the sea, is full of tender
lights. Shadows and trees are equally unsubstantial, the rides are
wreathed in vague mists, the last star has not quite faded from the
sky, and the voice of the thrush comes from the glens as in the story
of Vitigab, crying: "Deep—down deep—there somewhere in the
darkness I see a ray of light." The hollow tapping of the woodpecker
comes from the beech glades, whilst the rabbits shake the dew from
their fur, and the rustle of the stoat comes from the ferns; a nut
falls, and, looking up, you see against the sky, where the treetops
are waving in the palest sapphire air, the squirrel, the sweetest of all
wood things.
You observe one another and he is gone, and the wind draws up
from leagues away like the rustling of a silken skirt, till, suddenly, the
whole forest draws breath. You can hear it waking from its slumber
just as at dusk you can hear it falling to sleep; for the forest is a
living thing, a thing that breathes and speaks and has its dreams.
I was out early this morning, for I was going to breakfast with
Fauchard. I passed the glades where the rabbits were sporting,
chasing each other in circles smoothly and for all the world like toy
rabbits on wheels and driven by clockwork. I passed the pools where
the bulrushes stood up out of the mist, and nothing spoke of water
save the splash of the frog, or the ripple of the water-rat swimming.
Fauchard was waiting for me. We had breakfast—a simple enough
repast, consisting of coffee, biscuits, and cheese—and then we
started off to visit the traps and see what they had caught.
When Fauchard had collected his harvest of stoats and moles, killed
two snakes, and shot a marauding cat, it was late morning; the sun
was well over the treetops, and it was time for me to return home.
"Take that path," said the ranger. "Turn neither to the right nor left,
and it will lead you straight as an omnibus to the pavilion."
I bade him good morning, and, taking the path indicated, I set off. It
was not a drive; in fact, it was so narrow in parts that the hawthorn
bushes growing in this part of the wood nearly met; the fern in
places nearly blocked the way. It was warm, and very silent.
When I paused now and then to listen, I could hear nothing except
the buzzing of wasps and flies. The ground in places was boggy, the
path, it seemed to me, had not been used for years. Stories of
murderers and goblins occurred to my mind and made me press on
all the faster.
I had turned past a clump of alders when before me I caught a
glimpse of someone going in the same direction as myself—a boy of
my own age, to judge from his height, but I could not see what he
was dressed in, or whether he was a gypsy or a woodranger's child,
for he was always just ahead of my sight at the turnings, glimpsed
for a moment and then gone. I halloed to him to stop, for his
company would have been very acceptable in that lonely place, but
he made no reply. I ran, and pausing out of breath, I heard his
footsteps running, too; then they ceased, as though he were waiting
for me. It was like a game of hide-and-seek, and I laughed.
I walked softly and as quickly as I could, hoping to surprise him.
Then, at the next turning, I saw him. He was amidst the bushes on
the right; his head just peeped over the tops of them, and—he was
a child of about my own age, and extraordinarily like little Carl.
Filled with astonishment, not thinking what I did, I ran through the
bushes towards him, calling his name.
Then I remember nothing more.
 CHAPTER XVI
THE VICOMTE

I had fallen into a disused gravel-pit, treacherously hidden by the

bushes, so they told me afterwards. When I recovered from my
stunned condition, my cries for help had attracted the attention of
Fauchard's eldest son, who, fortunately, had been passing. I do not
remember calling for help; I remember nothing distinctly till I found
myself on my bed, and old Dr. Perichaud of Etiolles bending over me.
Then I became keenly alive to my position, for my right thigh was
broken in two places, and the doctor was setting it. When the thing
was over, the doctor retired with Joubert to the next room, and there
they talked. When will people learn that the sick have ears to hear
with, and a sense of hearing doubly acute?
This conversation came to my ears. The speakers spoke in a muted
voice, it is true, but this only made the matter worse.
"You have sent for the General, you say?"
"Oui, monsieur. A man on horseback has started to fetch him. He will
be here in an hour, unless——"
"Unless?"
"Monsieur does not know. The General has an affair of honour on
hand. This morning, in the Bois de Boulogne, he was to meet Baron
Imhoff."
"Aha!" said Perichaud, with appreciation. He was an old army
surgeon, who had tasted smoke, and seen men carved with other
things than scalpels. He was also a gossip, as most old army men
are. "Aha! And what was the cause of the affair? Do you know?"
"Oh, mon Dieu!" said Joubert, "it was all that cursed business at the
Schloss Lichtenberg, of which everyone is speaking. Baron Imhoff
was cousin"—mark the "was"—"of the Baron von Lichtenberg, Baron
Imhoff picked a quarrel at the Grand Club yesterday with the
General. That's all. It is a bad affair."
"And the Lichtenberg affair—the cause of all this?" said Perichaud.
"Ah, that beats the Moscow campaign," said Joubert, "for blackness
and treachery. Mark you: this is between ourselves. You will never
breathe a word of it to anyone?"
"No, no; not a word!"
"Well, the Baron Carl von Lichtenberg was mad."
"Mad?"
"Mad. What else can you call a man who brings his little daughter up
as a boy?"
"A boy?"
"It is true. He fancied she was some old dead-and-gone Lichtenberg
returned, and that she was doomed to be killed by the child in there
with the broken leg, whom he thought was some old dead-and-gone
Saluce returned. Then— Listen to me; and I trust monsieur's honour
never to let these words go further. He, or at least one of his
damned jägers, tried to smother the child. The night before, they
tried to stab him—as he lay asleep in bed—with my couteau de
chasse, and would have done it only the Blessed Virgin interposed."
"Great Heaven!" said the old doctor.
"Oh, yes," said Joubert; "that's the story. I saw it all with my own
eyes, or I wouldn't believe my own tongue with my own ears. And
now monsieur, what do you think of him?"
"Of him?" said Perichaud.
"Of the child. Is there danger?"
"Not a bit; but he'll be lame for life."
"Lame for life!"
"The femur is broken in two places, and splintered. The right leg will
be two inches shorter than the left. All the surgeons in Paris could
not do him any good."
"Then he will be useless for the army!" said Joubert. And I could
hear the catching of his breath.
"He will never see service," replied Perichaud.
A loud smash of crockery came as a reply to the doctor's
pronouncement. It was Joubert kicking a great Japanese jar on to
the floor.
As for me, I had heard the death-sentence of my hopes. I would
never wear a sword or lead a company into action. I would be a
thing with a lame leg—a cripple. Fortunately, an opiate which the
doctor had given me began to take effect. It did not make me
sleepy, but it dulled my thoughts—some of them; others it made
more bright. I lay listening to the doctor departing, and watching the
red sunset which was dyeing Etiolles, and the woods, and the walls
of my bedroom.
Then Joubert's words came into my head about Lichtenberg, and the
duel the General had fought that morning with Baron Imhoff. I did
not feel in the least uneasy about my father, and I was picturing the
duel in the woods of Lichtenberg, when a sound through the open
window came to my ears.
It was a carriage rapidly driving up the distant avenue to the
château.
It was my father, I felt sure. A long time passed, and then I heard
steps on the drawbridge; voices sounded from below. Then came a
step on the stairs; my door opened, and a gentleman stood framed
in the doorway.
I shall never forget my first sight of the Vicomte Armand de
Chatellan, my father's cousin on the Saluces' side, and my future
guardian.
I had never seen him before. He was not, indeed, a sight to come
often in a child's way, this flower of the boulevards, seventy if a day,
scented, exquisite, with a large impassive, evenly coloured red face,
the face of a Roman consul, in which were set the blue eyes of a
good-tempered child.
This great gentleman, who left the pavements of Paris only once a
year for a three weeks' visit to his estates in Auvergne, had travelled
express from Paris to tell a child that its father was lying dead, shot
through the heart by the Baron Imhoff. And this is how he did it: He
made a kindly little bow to me, and indicated Joubert to place a
chair by the bedside.
"And how are we this evening?" asked he, taking my wrist as a
physician might have done to feel my pulse.
I did not know who he was. I had vague suspicions that he was
another doctor. Never for a moment did I dream he was the bearer
of evil tidings. I said I was better—that old reply of the sick child—
and he talked on various subjects: the airiness of the room, the
beauty of the woods, and so forth. Then, to Joubert: "Distinctly
feverish. Must not be disturbed to-night. Ah, yes, in the morning;
that will be different. And no more tumbling into gravel pits,"
finished this astute old gentleman as he glanced back at me before
leaving the room.
Then the opiate closed its lid on me, and I did not even hear the
departure of the Vicomte Armand de Chatellan, my future guardian,
who shuffled out of the unpleasant business of grieving my heart on
the same evening that he shuffled into my life, he and his grand,
queer, quaint, and sometimes despicable personality, perfumed with
vervain and the cigars of the Café de Paris.
PART II
 CHAPTER XVII
A DÉJEÛNER AT THE CAFÉ DE PARIS

The death of my father cast me into an entirely new life. Anyone less
fitting than the Vicomte Armand de Chatellan to be the guardian of a
child of nine it would be hard to imagine at first sight. But my father
was no fool.
This gorgeous old night-moth of the Second Empire, this frequenter
of Tortoni's and the Café de Paris—always hard up, with an income
of two hundred thousand francs a year—was a man of rigid honour
in his way.
Left sole and irresponsible guardian of me and my money, he
shuffled out of his difficulties and bothers by placing the latter in the
funds and the former in the Bourdaloue College—that same college
of the Jesuit fathers where the Comte de Coigny was receiving his
education.
Here nine years of my life were spent—nine dull but not unhappy
years. Lame and unfit for the army, completely cut off from the only
profession fit for a gentleman—to use the Vicomte's expression—I
saw the others go off to join the Military College, and I would not
have felt it so bitterly had not De Coigny been amongst them. He
was my natural enemy. All the time we spent together at the
Bourdaloue, we scarcely spoke a word one to the other. Speechless
enmity: there can scarcely be a worse condition between boys or
men.
Once a month or so the Vicomte came to see me. Joubert came
often. He was installed as caretaker in the Château de Saluce, and
he would bring me presents of game and plovers' eggs, huge Jaronel
pears from the orchard, and cakes baked by Fauchard's wife.
During the first few months at the college, I had got leave from the
Father Superior to visit the Felicianis. A young priest accompanied
me. But the Felicianis were not at the Hôtel de Mayence; no one
knew anything about them; the hotel itself had changed hands after
the fashion of these small hotels, the short chapters of whose
histories have for heading "Bankruptcy."
Then I forgot.
Little by little the beautiful Countess and the sprightly Eloise faded
from my mind. Never entirely, but they passed to the region of
ghosts, the limbo of things half remembered.
I was not a diligent student. Good for nothing much except drawing.
I was an artist born, I believe, and had the artistic temperament,
which takes a delight in all things brilliant and beautiful, and tuneful
and grand, and holds in abhorrence all things dull and most things
useful. Smuggled novels and the poems of De Musset were the
literature of my heart. D'Artagnan and Bussey were my heroes, and
Esmeralda, that brilliant and gemlike creation, was my mistress.
Life is a love-story, a story that Nature alone can teach you to read.
And what are the poets and the great writers of prose but Nature's
priests, who repeat her litanies? Yet love-stories were banned at the
Bourdaloue, and Dumas was accounted a child of Satan. Which
statement is a preface to the comedy of my eighteenth birthday, or,
in other words, the twelfth of May, 1869.
I was to leave school on that day. The Vicomte de Chatellan was to
entertain me at déjeûner. I was to have rooms at his house in the
Place Vendôme; I was, in fact, to burst my sheath and become a
dragon-fly. I was to have an allowance of four hundred a year, to
teach me, as the Vicomte said, the value of money. Joubert was to
be unearthed from the Château de Saluce, and constituted my valet.
Blacquerie, the Viscount's tailor, and Champardy, his bootmaker, had
already called and taken the measurements for my new wardrobe. I
can tell you I was elated; and no debutante ever looked forward
more eagerly to the day of her debut than I to the twelfth of May.
At ten o'clock the Vicomte called for me. He was received in the
salon by the Principal and two of the Fathers. They liked me, these
men, and I liked them; and though I had imbibed Jesuitism as little
as a rock imbibes the sea-water in which it is immersed, I respected
Père Hyacinthe, and I loved, without any reserve, Father Ambrose, a
bull-necked Arlesian, who, incapable of hurting a fly in practice,
burnt heretics in theory, for ever, and for ever, and for ever in hell.
As we got into the Vicomte's carriage, this same Father Ambrose
came running out, and, just as we drove off, popped into my hand a
little green-covered book on the seven deadly sins.
"What's that?" asked the Vicomte, as I turned the leaves.
I showed it to him. "Pshaw!" said he, and flung it out of the window.
"All that stuff you have learned," said this worthy man, "is excellent
for children; but when we become men we put away childish things,
as M. de Voltaire or some other scoundrel of a philosopher, I think it
was, once remarked. Mark you, I say nothing against religion.
Religion is a most excellent institution; but in the world, my dear
Patrique, we are brought face to face with men. Religion is a fixed
institution; and the nones, or complines, whatever you call it that
they say to-day, were what they said two hundred years ago. But
men are very shifty, and, as a matter of fact, damned rogues. It is
very easy to be a saint in the College Bourdaloue; but it is very
difficult to be a gentleman in the Boulevard des Italiens, especially in
this bourgeois age" (he was a Royalist, with one foot in the Tuileries
and the other in the Faubourg St. Germain), "when we have a what-
do-you-call-it as President of the Council and a thingumbob on the
throne of France."
So he went on as he sat, erect as a man of thirty, gazing at the
passing streets with those blue tranquil eyes of a child, out of which
youth still looked; and turning to me the pro-consular profile of
which he was secretly so proud, and which was the thing, I believe,
up to which this strange old gentleman lived.
To live up to your profile is not a bad rule of life, if you have a face
like that possessed by the Vicomte Armand de Chatellan.
When we drew up at the Place Vendôme, I put my hand to open the
door, and received my first lesson in the convenances from the
Vicomte, who laid his gloved hand on my arm without a word. The
footman opened the door, and the grand old gentleman descended.
M. le Vicomte did not get out of a carriage—he descended. And with
what a grace! He waited courteously for me on the pavement; and
then, with a little wave of his clouded cane, shepherded me into the
house.
At the door, Beril, the Vicomte's personal servant, a man older than
his master, received us; and Joubert was in the hall with my
luggage.
"And now," said the Vicomte, when I had been shown my suite of
rooms, and very sumptuous they were, "déjeûner."
We got into the carriage which was waiting, the footman closed the
door, and we started for the Café de Paris.
Fourteen people were invited to the repast, besides myself. It took
place in the Amber Room overlooking the Boulevard; and six of the
guests were ladies. Very great ladies—duchesses, in my simple eyes.
Had I known more of breakfast-parties and the world, I might have
wondered at the disposition of the guests; for the Duc d'Harmonville,
an old gentleman with a white imperial and the exact expression of
a billy-goat, sat between two of the duchesses; and the rest of the
female illuminati sat, three of them altogether in one cluster, and the
sixth at the right of my guardian.
There was Pélisson of the "Moniteur," the only Press man present;
Carvalho of the Opéra Comique; the Duc de Cadore; Prince
Metternich, with his long Dundreary whiskers now lightly streaked
with grey; and, as for the rest, I did not catch their names, and I
have all but forgotten their faces.
One thing especially struck me in the male guests. With the
exception of Pélisson and Prince Metternich, their manner and their
voices recalled something or somebody to my mind, yet what thing
or person I could not remember, till Memory suddenly chalked on the
vacant space before her:
De Morny.
The languid air, the half-lisp, the attentive inattention of manner, all
were here, the very voice.
What a triumph! De Morny had been dead and buried nearly four
years, yet his reflection still lingered on the faces of these apes; his
voice had been silent since the orations and muffled drums of that
dramatic funeral, which outvied in splendour the funeral of
Germanicus, and which I had witnessed in company with Père
Hyacinthe and the pupils of the Bourdaloue; yet his voice still was
heard in the supper-rooms of Paris, discussing the length of ballet-
girls' skirts and the scandals of Plon-Plon.
With the fish the conversation became more general, and with the
iced champagne—served from jeroboams that took two waiters to
lift—decency and the ghost of De Morny rose to take their departure.
It was strange to me, a water-drinker, and therefore an observer of
the others, to see these men forgetting themselves, to see languid
faces become flushed, to hear soft voices become harsh, tongues
become ribald; to watch brutal lines asserting themselves in
countenances unveiled by alcohol. And it was surpassingly funny to
see the evanescence of the De Morny air.
At the head of the table, a tint more ruddy than usual, sat my
guardian, enjoying it all.
We had all, like the lunatic guests at the dinner-party of Dr. Tar and
Professor Feather, sat down to table apparently staid and
respectable people, and by degrees, just as lunacy set off the
Doctor's guests crowing like cocks and braying like asses, the spirit
of the Second Empire in its last and rottenest stages invaded the
Amber Room of the Café de Paris. Furious discussions, fumes of spilt
wines, wreaths of cigar and cigarette smoke, the cracked and cruel
laughter of women, filled the air.
* * * * *
And in the midst of it all sat my guardian, in his element, enjoying
the enjoyment of his guests, paternal, and with those childish blue
eyes through which youth looked so frankly, and that voice, so
courtly and well modulated, infecting the others with I know not
what. I only know that from him seemed to emanate the diablerie of
the party. Sober as myself, self-contained and courtly, he seemed
like the negative pole of some diabolical battery, of which the others
were the positive.
In the midst of the smoke and chatter he rose, and with a glass of
champagne between two fingers, as a lady holds a lily, he proposed
my health and my success in the world of Paris; and I rose and said
something—foolish, no doubt, but it did not matter, for Amy Féraud,
of the Théâtre Montparnasse, whilst she pelted Prince Metternich
with bonbons, lost her balance, fell smash on her back, pulling the
tablecloth with her, and in the confusion I sat down.
Half an hour later, arm-in-arm with my guardian, I was taking a
digestion walk down the Boulevard des Italiens. The old gentleman
was pleased, very pleased, for it seems I had conducted myself in a
modest and becoming manner, and the few words I had said had
been well said; and you might have thought that he was discussing
a children's party as he strolled by my side, saluting every person of
distinction that he met, and being saluted in return.
I really believe that this man was as innocent at heart as any child,
yet he was an old roué, a duellist, a gambler, all that a bad man
could be. Yet, though always hard up, he had jealously guarded my
patrimony, which he could have plundered if he had chosen with
impunity. His charity was boundless if you tapped it; and though he
spoke of women in a light way, I never heard him speak a bad word
of any man. And he loved animals, stopping to stroke a cat in the
Rue de Rivoli, and pausing, as he led me across to the Tuileries, to
admire the sparrows taking their dust-baths in the Royal precincts.
"Where are we going?" I asked, with a sudden apprehension.
"It is your eighteenth birthday," replied the Vicomte. And, still with
his arm in mine, he led me past the Cent-Gardes, up the steps, and
into the hall of the Palace.
One might have thought that the Palace of the Tuileries belonged to
the Vicomte de Chatellan, so perfectly at home did he seem. That he
was a well-known and respected visitor was evident from the
manner of the ushers. I was left in an anteroom, whilst the old
gentleman, led by the usher, disappeared for a moment; then he
came back, and, motioning me to follow him, he led the way into a
room, where, at a desk-table, with a cigarette between his lips and a
pen in his hand, sat Napoleon.
He threw the pen down and rose to greet us.
How wrinkled he looked! And how different, seen close and
familiarly, from what he appeared in his carriage, amidst a cloud of
dust, a glitter of sabres, and surrounded by his guards and
gentlemen!
Quite an unfearful person; old, and rather shuffling, easy-going, and
putting you at your ease, rather dreamy, and speaking with a slightly
nasal voice, rolling an armchair for you to sit in with his own august
hands, offering cigarettes with a little shake of the box to loosen
them and make your acceptance of one more easy, searching for a
matchbox amidst the papers on the desk: a true gentleman, though
an unfortunate Emperor.
Though I was eighteen, I was still very much of a child, and that is
perhaps why I felt an affection for the old gentleman at almost first
sight. He remembered my father perfectly well; and, with a shade of
sadness and wreathed in his cigarette smoke, he fell into a little
reverie. We talked—he, my guardian, and I. My lameness was
explained and commiserated, and, when our audience was ended
and M. Ollivier was announced as waiting, he pushed us out of his
cabinet, holding our hands affectionately, patting my shoulder, and
all with such a grace and goodness of heart as to make me for ever
his admirer and friend.
Ah, that was a good man lost in an Emperor!
 CHAPTER XVIII
MY FIRST NIGHT IN PARIS

"I am due to dine at the Duc de Bassano's," said my guardian as I

parted with him outside the Tuileries. "So, if we do not see one
another till to-morrow morning, au revoir. You have plenty of money
in your pocket, Paris is before you, you are young: amuse yourself."
Then the old gentleman marched off, and left me standing on the
pavement.
I could not help recalling my father's words in the room of the Duc
de Morny, years ago, when he dismissed me:
"Go and play."
I had five hundred francs in my pocket, I possessed rooms in the
Place Vendôme, a princely fortune lay at my back, I had a guardian,
everything that a guardian ought to be from a young man's point of
view, I had just shaken hands with the Emperor, I had the entrée of
the very best of society in France, yet I doubt if you could have
found a more forlorn creature than myself if you had searched the
whole of Paris.
I did not know where to go or what to do, so I went back to the
Place Vendôme, superintended the unpacking of my things, looked
at my new clothes, and at seven o'clock, called by the lovely
evening, I went out again, proposing to myself to dine somewhere
and see life.
Over the western sky, brilliant and liquid as a topaz, hung the
evening star. Paris was preparing for the festival of the night,
wrapping herself in the dark gauze of shadows and spangling herself
with lights. I hung on the Pont des Arts, looking at the dark lilac of
the Seine, looking at the drifting barges, listening to the sounds of
the city.
Then I walked on.
Oh, there is no doubt that we are led in this world when we seem to
lead, and that when we take a direction that brings us to fate it is
not by our own volition. This I was soon to prove.
I walked on—walked in the blindness of reverie—and opened my
eyes to find myself in a new world.
A broad boulevard, a blaze of lights, cafés thronged to the
pavement, the music of barrel-organs, laughter, and a crowd.
Such a crowd! Men with long hair, gentlemen in pegtop trousers,
wearing smoking-caps with tassels, smoking long pipes; men in rags,
hawkers yelling their wares, blind men tapping their way with their
sticks, deaf men blowing penny whistles, grisettes, gamins, poets,
painters, gnomes from the Rue du Truand, goblins from Montmartre,
Thénard and Claquesons, Fleur de Marie and Mimi Pinson,
Bouchardy and Bruyon; skull-like faces, ghost-like faces, faces like
roses, paint, satin, squalor, beauty; and all drifting as if blown by the
wind of the summer night, drifting under the stars, here in shadow,
here in the blaze of the roaring cafés, drifting, drifting, in a double
current from and towards the voiceless and gas-spangled Seine.
Not in the bazaars of Bagdad, or on the Bardo of Tunis, could you
see so fantastic a sight as the Boulevard St. Michel in the year 1869.
It fascinated me, and, mixing with the crowd, I drifted half the
length of the boulevard, till suddenly I was brought up as if by the
blast of a trumpet in my face. By the pavement a man had placed a
little carpet, six inches square; on this carpet, lit by the light of a
bullseye lantern, two tiny dolls, manipulated by an invisible thread,
were wrestling and tumbling, to the edification of a small crowd of
interested onlookers. One of these—a man with a violin under his
arm, a man with a round, fresh-coloured childish face—I knew at
sight. He had not altered in nine years. He was the good angel, the
violinist of that troupe of wandering musicians, whose music had
held me in the gallery of the Schloss Lichtenberg.
I laughed to myself with pleasure as I watched him watching the
dolls, all his simple soul absorbed in the sight, his violin under his
arm, and a hand in the pocket of his shabby coat, feeling for a coin
to pay for the entertainment.
He did not know me in the least. How could he connect the child in
its nightgown, looking down from the gallery of the castle, with the
young dandy who was raising his hat to him in the Boulevard St.
Michel?
"Excuse me, monsieur," said I, "but I believe I have the pleasure of
your acquaintance, though we have never spoken one word to each
other."
He smiled dubiously and plucked nervously at a violin-string,
evidently ransacking memories of beer-gardens and café-chantants
to find my face.
"You will not remember me," I went on, "but I remember you. Over
nine years ago, it was, in Germany, in the Schloss Lichtenberg. You
remember the Hunting-Song, the horn——"
"Ach Gott!" he cried, slapping himself on the forehead. "The child in
the gallery, the one in white——"
"Yes," said I; "that was me. You see, I don't forget my friends."
He was too astounded to say anything for a moment; the wretched
difference our clothes made in us confused his simple mind.
Then he wiped his hand with fingers outspread across his broad
face. It was just as if he had wiped away his amazement like a veil,
exposing the beneficent smile that was his true expression.
"Wunderschön!" said he.
"Wunderschön indeed," replied I, laughing. "But I have much more
to tell you. Come, let us walk down the Boulevard together, if you
have a moment to spare. You saved my life that night—you and
those friends of yours—and I must tell you about it."
I knew this man quite well, though I had never spoken to him
before. A really good man is the friend of all the world; you speak to
him, and you know him as though you had known him all your life,
for the soul and essence of his goodness is simplicity, and instinct
tells you he has no dark corners in his soul. In his greatness he does
not dream of dark corners in yours, and so at a word you become
friends.
I told him my story, and then he told me his.
He had belonged to a band of wandering musicians, long since
dispersed; and on that eventful day in September, nine years ago, he
and the rest of the band had been playing at Homburg. They had
done badly; and, after a long day's tramp, making for Friedrichsdorff,
they saw before them, just at sunset, the towers of Lichtenberg in
the distance.
He, Franzius, pointed them out to the others, and proposed that
they should try their luck there, but Marx, the leader of the band,
demurred. A coin was tossed, and the answer of Fate was "Go," so
they went.
"Ah, yes," said Franzius, as he finished. "And well it was we did so.
And the child who was with you in the gallery—the little boy—how is
he?"
"What child?" said I.
"He in the gallery standing beside you, dressed as a soldier, with
cross-belt like the grenadiers of Pomerania."
A cold hand seemed laid on my heart, for no child had been with me
in the gallery on that night; and the description given by Franzius
was the description of little Carl.
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