Who does not remember his flaming red revolutionary pamphlets?  Their sudden swarmings used to overwhelm the powers of every Continental police like a plague of crimson gadflies.  But this extreme writer has been also the active inspirer of secret societies, the mysterious unknown Number One of desperate conspiracies suspected and unsuspected, matured or baffled.  And the world at large has never had an inkling of that fact!  This accounts for him going about amongst us to this day, a veteran of many subterranean campaigns, standing aside now, safe within his reputation of merely the greatest destructive publicist that ever lived.”

Thus wrote my friend, adding that Mr. X was an enlightened connoisseur of bronzes and china, and asking me to show him my collection.

X turned up in due course.  My treasures are disposed in three large rooms without carpets and curtains.  There is no other furniture than the etagres and the glass cases whose contents shall be worth a fortune to my heirs.  I allow no fires to be lighted, for fear of accidents, and a fire-proof door separates them from the rest of the house.

It was a bitter cold day.  We kept on our overcoats and hats.  Middle-sized and spare, his eyes alert in a long, Roman-nosed countenance, X walked on his neat little feet, with short steps, and looked at my collection intelligently.  I hope I looked at him intelligently, too.  A snow-white moustache and imperial made his nutbrown complexion appear darker than it really was.  In his fur coat and shiny tall hat that terrible man looked fashionable.  I believe he belonged to a noble family, and could have called himself Vicomte X de la Z if he chose.  We talked nothing but bronzes and porcelain.  He was remarkably appreciative.  We parted on cordial terms.

Where he was staying I don’t know.  I imagine he must have been a lonely man.  Anarchists, I suppose, have no families—­not, at any rate, as we understand that social relation.  Organization into families may answer to a need of human nature, but in the last instance it is based on law, and therefore must be something odious and impossible to an anarchist.  But, indeed, I don’t understand anarchists.  Does a man of that—­of that—­persuasion still remain an anarchist when alone, quite alone and going to bed, for instance?  Does he lay his head on the pillow, pull his bedclothes over him, and go to sleep with the necessity of the chambardement general, as the French slang has it, of the general blow-up, always present to his mind?  And if so how can he?  I am sure that if such a faith (or such a fanaticism) once mastered my thoughts I would never be able to compose myself sufficiently to sleep or eat or perform any of the routine acts of daily life.  I would want no wife, no children; I could have no friends, it seems to me; and as to collecting bronzes or china, that, I should say, would be quite out of the question.  But I don’t know.  All I know is that Mr. X took his meals in a very good restaurant which I frequented also.