er quarters of Paris.
"Poorer quarters" is a nice vague term. There are many poorer quarters
in a large city. This was one of them. Let that suffice to the
critical pedants who clamour for accuracy and local colour. Accuracy!
pah! Shall the soaring soul of a three-volumer be restrained by the
debasing fetters of a grovelling exactitude? Never! I will tell you
what. If I choose, I who speak to you, _moi qui vous parle_, the Seine
shall run red with the blood of murdered priests, and there shall be
a tide in it where no tide ever was before, close to Paris itself,
the home of the _Marrons Glaces_, and into the river I shall plunge
a corpse with upturned face and glassy, staring, haunting, dreadful
eyes, and the tide shall turn, the tide that never was on earth, or
sky, or sea, it shall turn in my second volume for one night only,
and carry the corpse of my victim back, back, back under bridges
innumerable, back into the heart of Paris. Dreadful, isn't it?
_Allons, mon ami. Qu'est-ce-qu'il-y-a. Je ne sais quoi. Mon Dieu!_
There's idiomatic French for you, all sprinkled out of a cayenne
pepper-pot to make the local colour hot and strong. Bah! let us return
to our muttons!

CHAPTER II.

What was that? Something yellow, and spotted--something sinuous and
lithe, with crawling, catlike motion. No, no! Yes, yes!! A leopard
of the forest had issued from a side-street, a _cul de sac_, as the
frivolous sons of Paris, the Queen of Vice, call it. It was moving
with me, stopping when I stopped, galloping when I galloped, turning
somersaults when I turned them. And then it spoke to me--spoke,
yes, spoke, this thing of the desert--this wild phantasm of a brain
distraught by over-indulgence in _marrons glaces_, the curse of _ma
patrie_, and its speech was as the scent of scarlet poppies, plucked
from the grave of a discarded mistress.

"Thou shalt write," it said, "for it is thine to reform the world." I
shuddered. The conversational "thou" is fearful at all times; but, ah,
how true to nature, even the nature of a leopard of the forest. The
beast continued--"But thou shalt write in English."

"Spare me!" I ventured to interpose.

"In English," it went on, inexorably--"in hysterical, sad, mad, bad
English. And the tale shall be of France--France, where the ladies
always leave the dinner-table before the men. Note this, and use it
at page ninety of thy first volume. And thy French shall be worse than
thy English, for thou shalt spea