girdled with plaques of gold on which were traced magic symbols in clustered rubies, clad in the barbaric splendour of an Eastern queen; presently she would be wearing the black hood, pointed above the brow, and the dusky velvet robe of a Royal widow, like the portraits to be seen guarded as holy relics in a chamber of the Louvre; last travesty of all (and it was in this guise he found her most adorable), as a modern horsewoman, clothed from neck to heel in a close-fitting habit, a man’s hat set rakishly on her dainty head.  He would fain spend his life in these romantic dreams, and devoured Racine, the Greek tragedians, Corneille, Shakespeare, Voltaire’s verses on the death of Adrienne Lecouvreur, and whatever in modern literature appealed to him as elegant or fraught with passion.  But in all these creations it was one image, and one only, that he saw.

Going one evening to the dram-shop with the Marquis Tudesco, who had given up all idea of discarding his checked waistcoat, he made the acquaintance of an old man whose white hair lay in ringlets on his shoulders and who still had the blue eyes of a child.  He was an architect fallen to ruin along with the little Gothic erections he had raised at great expense in the Paris suburbs about 1840.  His name was Theroulde, and the old fellow, whose smiling face belied his wretched condition, overflowed with anecdotes of artists and pretty women.

In his prosperous days he had built country villas for actresses and attended many a joyous house-warming, the fun and frolic of which were still fresh in the light-hearted veteran’s memory.  He had long ceased to care who heard him, and primed with maraschino, he would unfold his reminiscences like some sumptuous tapestry gone to tatters.  The bookseller’s son, meeting an artist for the first time, listened to the old Bohemian with rapt enthusiasm.  All these forgotten celebrities, or half-celebrities, all these old young beauties of whom Theroulde spoke, came to life again for him, fascinated him with an unexpected charm and a piquant sense of familiarity.  Servien pictured them as he had seen them represented in the old foxed lithographs that litter the second-hand bookstalls along the Quais, wearing the hair in flat bandeaux with a jewel on a gold chain in the middle of the forehead, or else in heavy ringlets a l’Anglaise brushing the cheeks.  Obsessed by his one idea, he endeavoured to recall one who seemed so well acquainted with ladies of the stage to the present day.  He spoke of tragedy, but Theroulde said he thought that sort of plays ridiculous, and repeated a number of parodies.  Jean mentioned Gabrielle T——.

“T——­,” exclaimed the artist-architect; “I knew her mother well.”

Never in all his life had Jean heard a sentence that interested him so profoundly.