ning before the wedding I had a
telegram--it was from my old father at Aigues-Mortes--to tell me that
the historic Chateau de Mireilles, with my priceless collection of
pictures, had been burned to the ground."

IV

THE ADVENTURE OF THE FOUNDLING

There was a time when Aristide Pujol, in sole charge of an automobile,
went gaily scuttering over the roads of France. I use the word
advisedly. If you had heard the awful thing as it passed by you would
agree that it is the only word adequate to express its hideous mode of
progression. It was a two-seated, scratched, battered, ramshackle tin
concern of hoary antiquity, belonging to the childhood of the race. Not
only horses, but other automobiles shied at it. It was a vehicle of
derision. Yet Aristide regarded it with glowing pride and drove it with
such daredevilry that the parts must have held together only through
sheer breathless wonder. Had it not been for the car, he told me, he
would not have undertaken the undignified employment in which he was
then engaged--the mountebank selling of a corn-cure in the public places
of small towns and villages. It was not a fitting pursuit for a late
managing director of a public company and an ex-Professor of French in
an English Academy for Young Ladies. He wanted to rise, _ma foi_, not
descend in the social scale. But when hunger drives--_que voulez-vous_?
Besides, there was the automobile. It is true he had bound himself by
his contract to exhibit a board at the back bearing a flaming picture of
the success of the cure and a legend: "_Guerissez vos cors_," and to
display a banner with the same device, when weather permitted. But,
still, there was the automobile.

It had been lying for many motor-ages in the shed of the proprietors of
the cure, the Maison Hieropath of Marseilles, neglected, forlorn, eaten
by rust and worm, when suddenly an idea occurred to their business
imagination. Why should they not use the automobile to advertise and
sell the cure about the country? The apostle in charge would pay for his
own petrol, take a large percentage on sales, and the usual traveller's
commission on orders that he might place. But where to find an apostle?
Brave and desperate men came in high hopes, looked at the car, and,
shaking their heads sorrowfully, went away. At last, at the loosest of
ends, came Aristide. The splendour of the idea--a poet, in his way, was
Aristide, and the Idea was the thing that always held him capt