ugnaciously asseverating that no garden equalled
his city park and no main street his Cannebiere. He seemed to have no
destination in particular; he stopped here and there at random, and used
a large and powerful field-glass, slung by a patent leather strap over
his brawny shoulders, to study the points in the wide landscape. Now and
then he made notes in his guide-book, but with a good-humored
listlessness which would have disarmed the most suspicious of military
detectives. On descending the hillside, he did not scruple to stop to
chat with a nurse maid or two out with the children, and to open his
hand as freely to give the latter some silver as he had opened his heart
to the girl--all with an easy, hearty laugh, and the oily accent of his
fellow-countrymen.

He exchanged the time of day with the clerks hurrying to the railroad
station; he did not disdain to ask the roadmender, seated on a pile of
stones, how his labor was getting on, and where he would work next week;
he leaned on the gate to listen as if enrapt to the groom and gardener
of a neighbor of Clemenceau's, regretting that the hubbub of cracking
guns and other ominous explosions was driving their master from home.
Then, rattling his loose silver, and whistling a fisher's song, which he
must have picked up off the Hyeres, he paused before the gateway of the
house which had become the Ogre's Cave of Montmorency, and read half
aloud the placard nailed on a board to a tree and announcing that the
property was in the open market.

"The Reine-Claude Villa, eh!" muttered he to himself. "The name pleases
me! I must go in and see if it is worth the money. To say nothing," he
added still more secretly, "of the mistress having returned this
morning. I wonder how she had the courage to walk along the road in the
dawn, when she might have met the ghost of our poor Gratian von
Linden-hohen-Linden!"

This acquaintance with the unpublished story of Madame Clemenceau rather
contradicted the aspect and accent of a Marseillais, and, although the
black whiskers did not remind one of Von Sendlingen when we saw him at
Munich, than of his clear shaven, wrinkled face as the Marchioness de
Letourlagneau pianist, it was not so with the burly figure, more robust
than corpulent.

He opened the gate without ringing and stepped inside on the gravel path
winding up to the pretty but not lively house.

"Attention," he muttered suddenly, in a military tone. "Here is our own
little