The Adventures of a Modest Man

"Dearest!"

"No – you can never know how much easier it had been for me to die than to love – as I have loved a man this day."

"Confound you, Williams," I said, blinking.

But he did not hear me, sitting there in a literary revery, mentally repolishing the carefully considered paragraphs with which he had just regaled me.

"Williams?"

"What?"

"So – they're living in Normandy."

"Who?"

"Jim Landon and that girl, dammit!" I said, crossly.

"Yes – oh, yes, of course. Children – bunches of 'em – and all that."

"Williams?"

"What?"

"Was she so pretty?"

"Certainly," he said, absently. "Don't bother me now; I've got an idea for another story."

CHAPTER VII

THE BITER, THE BITTEN, AND THE UN-BITTEN

"Mais tout le monde," began the chasseur of the Hôtel des Michetons – "mais, monsieur, tout le grand monde – "

"Exactly," said I, complacently. "Le grand monde means the great world; and," I added, "the world is a planet of no unusual magnitude, inhabited by bipeds whose entire existence is passed in attempting to get something for nothing."

The chasseur of the Hôtel des Michetons bowed, doubtfully.

"You request me," I continued, "not to forget you when I go away. Why should I not forget you? Are you historical, are you antique, are you rococo, are you a Rosacrucian?"

The chasseur, amiably perplexed, twirled his gold-banded cap between his fingers.

"Have you," I asked, "ever done one solitary thing for me besides touching your expensive cap?"

The chasseur touched his cap, smiled, and hopefully held out his large empty hand.

"Go to the devil," I said gently; "it is not for what you have done but for what you have not done that I give you this silver piece," and I paid the tribute which I despised myself for paying. Still, his gay smile and prompt salute are certainly worth something to see, but what their precise value may be you can only determine when, on returning to New York, you hear a gripman curse a woman for crossing the sacred tracks of the Metropolitan Street Railroad Company. So, with my daughter Dulcima and my daughter Alida, and with a wagon-load of baggage, I left the gorgeously gilded Hôtel des Michetons – for these three reasons:

Number one: it was full of Americans.

Number two: that entire section of Paris resembled a slice of the Waldorf-Astoria.

Number three: I wanted to be rid of the New York Herald. Surely somewhere in Paris there existed French newspapers, French people, and French speech. I meant to discover them or write and complain to the Outlook.

The new hotel I had selected was called the Hôtel de l'Univers. I had noticed it while wandering out of the Luxembourg Gardens. It appeared to be a well situated, modest, clean hotel, and not only thoroughly respectable – which the great gilded Hôtel des Michetons was not – but also typically and thoroughly French. So I took an apartment on the first floor and laid my plans to dine out every evening with my daughters.

They were naturally not favourably impressed with the Hôtel de l'Univers, but I insisted on trying it for a week, desiring that my daughters should have at least a brief experience in a typical French hotel.

On the third day of our stay my daughters asked me why the guests at the Hôtel de l'Univers all appeared to be afflicted in one way or another. I myself had noticed that many of the guests wore court-plaster on hands and faces, and some even had their hands bandaged in slings.

I thought, too, that the passers-by in the street eyed the modest hotel with an interest somewhat out of proportion to its importance. But I set that down to French alertness and inbred curiosity, and dismissed the subject from my mind. The hotel was pretty clean and highly respectable. Titled names were not wanting among the guests, and the perfect courtesy of the proprietor, his servants, and of the guests was most refreshing after the carelessness and bad manners of the crowds at the Hôtel des Michetons.

"Can it be possible?" said Alida, as we three strolled out of our hotel into the Boulevard St. Michel.

"What?" I asked.

"That we are in the Latin Quarter? Why this boulevard is beautiful, and I had always pictured the Latin Quarter as very dreadful."

"It's the inhabitants that are dreadful," said I with a shudder as a black-eyed young girl, in passing, gave me an amused and exceedingly saucy smile.

The "Quarter!" It is beautiful – one of the most beautiful portions of Paris. The Luxembourg Gardens are the centre and heart of the Latin Quarter – these ancient gardens, with their groves of swaying chestnuts all in bloom, quaint weather-beaten statues in a grim semicircle looking out over the flowering almonds on the terrace to the great blue basin of the fountain where toy yachts battle with waves almost an inch high.

Here the big drab-colored pigeons strut and coo in the sunshine, here the carp splash in the mossy fountain of Marie de Medici, here come the nursemaids with their squalling charges, to sit on the marble benches and coquette with the red-trousered soldiers, who are the proper and natural prey of all nursemaids in all climes.

"What is that banging and squeaking?" asked Alida, as we entered the foliage of the southern terrace. "Not Punch and Judy – oh, I haven't seen Punch since I was centuries younger! Do let us go, papa!"

Around the painted puppet box children sat, open-mouthed. Back of them crowded parents and nurses and pretty girls and gay young officers, while, from the pulpit, Punch held forth amid screams of infantile delight, or banged his friends with his stick in the same old fashion that delighted us all – centuries since.

"Such a handsome officer," said Alida under her breath.

The officer in question, a dragoon, was looking at Dulcima in that slightly mischievous yet well-bred manner peculiar to European officers.

Dulcima did not appear to observe him.

"Why – why, that is Monsieur de Barsac, who came over on our ship!" said Alida, plucking me by the sleeve. "Don't you remember how nice he was when we were so – so sea – miserable? You really ought to bow to him, papa. If you don't, I will."

I looked at the dragoon and caught his eye – such a bright, intelligent, mischievous eye! – and I could not avoid bowing.

Up he came, sword clanking, white-gloved hand glued to the polished visor of his crimson cap, and – the girls were delighted.

Now what do you suppose that Frenchman did? He gave up his entire day to showing us the beauties of the Rive Gauche.

Under his generous guidance my daughters saw what few tourists see intelligently – the New Sorbonne, with its magnificent mural decorations by Puvis de Chavannes; we saw the great white-domed Observatory, piled up in the sky like an Eastern temple, and the beautiful old palace of the Luxembourg. Also, we beheld the Republican Guards, à cheval, marching out of their barracks on the Rue de Tournon; and a splendid glittering company of cavalry they were, with their silver helmets, orange-red facings, white gauntlets, and high, polished boots – the picked men of all the French forces, as far as physique is concerned.

In the late afternoon haze the dome of the Pantheon, towering over the Latin Quarter, turned to purest cobalt in the sky. Under its majestic shadow the Boulevard St. Michel ran all green and gold with gas-jets already lighted in lamps and restaurants and the scores of students' cafés which line the main artery of the "Quartier Latin."

"I wish," said Alida, "that it were perfectly proper for us to walk along those terraces."

Captain de Barsac appeared extremely doubtful, but entirely at our disposal.