ticles like the one to-day, I'll answer for it
that you won't succeed. You undertake to struggle with Paris, my boy,
but you're not big enough, you know nothing about it. This isn't the
Orient, and, although we don't wring the necks of people who offend us,
or throw them into the water in leather bags, we have other ways of
putting them out of sight. Let your master beware, Noel. One of these
days Paris will swallow him as I swallow this plum, without spitting out
the stone or the skin!"

Really the old man was most imposing, and, notwithstanding the paint on
his face, I began to feel some respect for him. While he was speaking we
heard the music overhead, the singing provided for the entertainment of
the guests, and out on the square the horses of the municipal guards
shaking their curb-chains. Our party must have been a very brilliant
affair from outside, with the myriads of candles and the illuminated
doorway. And when one thinks of the ruin that perhaps was beneath it
all! We stood there in the vestibule like rats taking council together
in the hold, when the vessel is beginning to take in water without the
crew suspecting it, and I saw plainly enough that everybody, footmen and
lady's maids, would soon scamper away at the first alarm. Can it be that
such a catastrophe is possible? But in that case, what would become of
me and the _Territoriale_, and my advances and my back pay?

That Francis left me with cold shivers running down my back.

XVI.

A PUBLIC MAN.

The luminous warmth of a bright May afternoon made the lofty windows of
the hotel de Mora as hot as the glass roof of a greenhouse; its
transparent hangings of blue silk could be seen from without between the
branches, and its broad terraces, where the exotic flowers, brought into
the air for the first time, ran like a border all the length of the
quay. The great rakes scraping among the shrubs in the garden left on
the gravelled paths the light footprints of summer, while the soft
pattering of the water from the sprinklers on the green lawn seemed like
its revivifying song.

All the magnificence of the princely abode shone resplendent in the
pleasant mildness of the temperature, borrowing a grandiose beauty from
the silence, the repose of that noonday hour, the only hour in the day
when one did not hear carriages rumbling under the arches, the great
doors of the reception-room opening and closing, and the constant
vibration in the ivy on the w