this guise he found her most adorable), as a modern horsewoman,
clothed from neck to heel in a close-fitting habit, a man's hat
set rakishly on her dainty head. He would fain spend his life in
these romantic dreams, and devoured Racine, the Greek tragedians,
Corneille, Shakespeare, Voltaire's verses on the death of Adrienne
Lecouvreur, and whatever in modern literature appealed to him
as elegant or fraught with passion. But in all these creations
it was one image, and one only, that he saw.

Going one evening to the dram-shop with the Marquis Tudesco,
who had given up all idea of discarding his checked waistcoat,
he made the acquaintance of an old man whose white hair lay in
ringlets on his shoulders and who still had the blue eyes of a
child. He was an architect fallen to ruin along with the little
Gothic erections he had raised at great expense in the Paris
suburbs about 1840. His name was Theroulde, and the old fellow,
whose smiling face belied his wretched condition, overflowed
with anecdotes of artists and pretty women.

In his prosperous days he had built country villas for actresses
and attended many a joyous house-warming, the fun and frolic of
which were still fresh in the light-hearted veteran's memory. He
had long ceased to care who heard him, and primed with maraschino,
he would unfold his reminiscences like some sumptuous tapestry
gone to tatters. The bookseller's son, meeting an artist for the
first time, listened to the old Bohemian with rapt enthusiasm.
All these forgotten celebrities, or half-celebrities, all these
old young beauties of whom Theroulde spoke, came to life again
for him, fascinated him with an unexpected charm and a piquant
sense of familiarity. Servien pictured them as he had seen them
represented in the old foxed lithographs that litter the second-hand
bookstalls along the _Quais_, wearing the hair in flat bandeaux
with a jewel on a gold chain in the middle of the forehead, or
else in heavy ringlets _a l'Anglaise_ brushing the cheeks. Obsessed
by his one idea, he endeavoured to recall one who seemed so well
acquainted with ladies of the stage to the present day. He spoke
of tragedy, but Theroulde said he thought that sort of plays
ridiculous, and repeated a number of parodies. Jean mentioned
Gabrielle T----.

"T----," exclaimed the artist-architect; "I knew her mother well."

Never in all his life had Jean heard a sentence that interested
him so profoundly.

"I knew her in 184