crossed the river, the unwinking towers of Notre Dame towering
pallidly against the dark sky behind us; rattled into the new light of
the resuming boulevard; turned up a dark street, and came to a halt
before a half-familiar shut door. You know how one wakes the sleepy
concierge, how one takes one's candle, climbs up hundreds and hundreds
of smooth stairs, following the slipshod footfalls of a half-awakened
guide upward through Rembrandt's own shadows, and how one's final sleep
is sweetened by the little inconveniences of a strange bare room and of
a strange hard bed.

CHAPTER TEN

Before noon of the next day I was ascending the stairs of the new house
in which the Duc had his hermitage. There was an air of secrecy in the
broad publicity of the carpeted stairs that led to his flat; a hush in
the atmosphere; in the street itself, a glorified _cul de sac_ that ran
into the bustling life of the Italiens. It had the sudden sluggishness
of a back-water. One seemed to have grown suddenly deaf in the midst of
the rattle.

There was an incredible suggestion of silence--the silence of a private
detective--in the mien of the servant who ushered me into a room. He was
the English servant of the theatre--the English servant that foreigners
affect. The room had a splendour of its own, not a cheaply vulgar
splendour, but the vulgarity of the most lavish plush and purple kind.
The air was heavy, killed by the scent of exotic flowers, darkened by
curtains that suggested the voluminous velvet backgrounds of certain old
portraits. The Duc de Mersch had carried with him into this place of
retirement the taste of the New Palace, that show-place of his that was
the stupefaction of swarms of honest tourists.

I remembered soon enough that the man was a philanthropist, that he
might be an excellent man of heart and indifferent of taste. He must be.
But I was prone to be influenced by things of this sort, and felt
depressed at the thought that so much of royal excellence should weigh
so heavily in the wrong scale of the balance of the applied arts. I
turned my back on the room and gazed at the blazing white decorations of
the opposite house-fronts.

A door behind me must have opened, for I heard the sounds of a
concluding tirade in a high-pitched voice.

"_Et quant a un duc de farce, je ne m'en fiche pas mal, moi_," it said
in an accent curiously compounded of the foreign and the _coulisse_. A
muttered male remonstrance ensued,