ass front from the main body of the _cafe_. The usual marble tables
are there, and it is there we sat and aestheticised till two o'clock in the
morning. But who is that man? he whose prominent eyes flash with
excitement. That is Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. The last or the supposed last
of the great family. He is telling that girl a story--that fair girl with
heavy eyelids, stupid and sensual. She is, however, genuinely astonished
and interested, and he is striving to play upon her ignorance. Listen to
him. "Spain--the night is fragrant with the sea and the perfume of the
orange trees, you know--a midnight of stars and dreams. Now and then the
silence is broken by the sentries challenging--that is all. But not in
Spanish but in French are the challenges given; the town is in the hands of
the French; it is under martial law. But now an officer passes down a
certain garden, a Spaniard disguised as a French officer; from the balcony
the family--one of the most noble and oldest families Spain can boast of, a
thousand years, long before the conquest of the Moors--watches him. Well
then"--Villiers sweeps with a white feminine hand the long hair that is
falling over his face--he has half forgotten, he is a little mixed in the
opening of the story, and he is striving in English to "scamp," in French
to _escamoter_. "The family are watching, death if he is caught, if he
fails to kill the French sentry. The cry of a bird, some vague sound
attracts the sentry, he turns; all is lost. The Spaniard is seized. Martial
law, Spanish conspiracy must be put down. The French general is a man of
iron." (Villiers laughs, a short hesitating laugh that is characteristic of
him, and continues in his abrupt, uncertain way), "man of iron; not only he
declares that the spy must be beheaded, but also the entire family--a man
of iron that, ha, ha; and then, no you cannot, it is impossible for you to
understand the enormity of the calamity--a thousand years before the
conquest by the Moors, a Spaniard alone could--there is no one here, ha,
ha, I was forgetting--the utter extinction of a great family of the name,
the oldest and noblest of all the families in Spain, it is not easy to
understand that, no, not easy here in the 'Nouvelle Athenes'--ha, ha, one
must belong to a great family to understand, ha, ha.

"The father beseeches; he begs that one member may be spared to continue
the name--the youngest son--that is all; if he could be saved, the rest
what m