"I am due to dine at the Duc de Bassano's," said my guardian as I parted with him outside the Tuileries. "So, if we do not see one another till to-morrow morning, au revoir. You have plenty of money in your pocket, Paris is before you, you are young: amuse yourself."

Then the old gentleman marched off, and left me standing on the pavement.

I could not help recalling my father's words in the room of the Duc de Morny, years ago, when he dismissed me:

"Go and play."

I had five hundred francs in my pocket, I possessed rooms in the Place VendÔme, a princely fortune lay at my back, I had a guardian, everything that a guardian ought to be from a young man's point of view, I had just shaken hands with the Emperor, I had the entrÉe of the very best of society in France, yet I doubt if you could have found a more forlorn creature than myself if you had searched the whole of Paris.

I did not know where to go or what to do, so I went back to the Place VendÔme, superintended the unpacking of my things, looked at my new clothes, and at seven o'clock, called by the lovely evening, I went out again, proposing to myself to dine somewhere and see life.

Over the western sky, brilliant and liquid as a topaz, hung the evening star. Paris was preparing for the festival of the night, wrapping herself in the dark gauze of shadows and spangling herself with lights. I hung on the Pont des Arts, looking at the dark lilac of the Seine, looking at the drifting barges, listening to the sounds of the city.

Then I walked on.

Oh, there is no doubt that we are led in this world when we seem to lead, and that when we take a direction that brings us to fate it is not by our own volition. This I was soon to prove.

I walked on—walked in the blindness of reverie—and opened my eyes to find myself in a new world.

A broad boulevard, a blaze of lights, cafÉs thronged to the pavement, the music of barrel-organs, laughter, and a crowd.

Such a crowd! Men with long hair, gentlemen in pegtop trousers, wearing smoking-caps with tassels, smoking long pipes; men in rags, hawkers yelling their wares, blind men tapping their way with their sticks, deaf men blowing penny whistles, grisettes, gamins, poets, painters, gnomes from the Rue du Truand, goblins from Montmartre, ThÉnard and Claquesons, Fleur de Marie and Mimi Pinson, Bouchardy and Bruyon; skull-like faces, ghost-like faces, faces like roses, paint, satin, squalor, beauty; and all drifting as if blown by the wind of the summer night, drifting under the stars, here in shadow, here in the blaze of the roaring cafÉs, drifting, drifting, in a double current from and towards the voiceless and gas-spangled Seine.

Not in the bazaars of Bagdad, or on the Bardo of Tunis, could you see so fantastic a sight as the Boulevard St. Michel in the year 1869.

It fascinated me, and, mixing with the crowd, I drifted half the length of the boulevard, till suddenly I was brought up as if by the blast of a trumpet in my face. By the pavement a man had placed a little carpet, six inches square; on this carpet, lit by the light of a bullseye lantern, two tiny dolls, manipulated by an invisible thread, were wrestling and tumbling, to the edification of a small crowd of interested onlookers. One of these—a man with a violin under his arm, a man with a round, fresh-coloured childish face—I knew at sight. He had not altered in nine years. He was the good angel, the violinist of that troupe of wandering musicians, whose music had held me in the gallery of the Schloss Lichtenberg.

I laughed to myself with pleasure as I watched him watching the dolls, all his simple soul absorbed in the sight, his violin under his arm, and a hand in the pocket of his shabby coat, feeling for a coin to pay for the entertainment.

He did not know me in the least. How could he connect the child in its nightgown, looking down from the gallery of the castle, with the young dandy who was raising his hat to him in the Boulevard St. Michel?

"Excuse me, monsieur," said I, "but I believe I have the pleasure of your acquaintance, though we have never spoken one word to each other."

He smiled dubiously and plucked nervously at a violin-string, evidently ransacking memories of beer-gardens and cafÉ-chantants to find my face.

"You will not remember me," I went on, "but I remember you. Over nine years ago, it was, in Germany, in the Schloss Lichtenberg. You remember the Hunting-Song, the horn——"

"Ach Gott!" he cried, slapping himself on the forehead. "The child in the gallery, the one in white——"

"Yes," said I; "that was me. You see, I don't forget my friends."

He was too astounded to say anything for a moment; the wretched difference our clothes made in us confused his simple mind.

Then he wiped his hand with fingers outspread across his broad face. It was just as if he had wiped away his amazement like a veil, exposing the beneficent smile that was his true expression.

"WunderschÖn!" said he.

"WunderschÖn indeed," replied I, laughing. "But I have much more to tell you. Come, let us walk down the Boulevard together, if you have a moment to spare. You saved my life that night—you and those friends of yours—and I must tell you about it."

I knew this man quite well, though I had never spoken to him before. A really good man is the friend of all the world; you speak to him, and you know him as though you had known him all your life, for the soul and essence of his goodness is simplicity, and instinct tells you he has no dark corners in his soul. In his greatness he does not dream of dark corners in yours, and so at a word you become friends.

I told him my story, and then he told me his.

He had belonged to a band of wandering musicians, long since dispersed; and on that eventful day in September, nine years ago, he and the rest of the band had been playing at Homburg. They had done badly; and, after a long day's tramp, making for Friedrichsdorff, they saw before them, just at sunset, the towers of Lichtenberg in the distance.

He, Franzius, pointed them out to the others, and proposed that they should try their luck there, but Marx, the leader of the band, demurred. A coin was tossed, and the answer of Fate was "Go," so they went.

"Ah, yes," said Franzius, as he finished. "And well it was we did so. And the child who was with you in the gallery—the little boy—how is he?"

"What child?" said I.

"He in the gallery standing beside you, dressed as a soldier, with cross-belt like the grenadiers of Pomerania."

A cold hand seemed laid on my heart, for no child had been with me in the gallery on that night; and the description given by Franzius was the description of little Carl.

"Franzius," said I, stopping and facing him, "there was no one in the gallery but myself. Of that I am positive."

There we stood facing each other in the glare of a cafÉ, with the roar of the Boul' Miche around us, each equally astonished.

Then Franzius laughed at the absurdity of the notion that he was wrong.

"With these two eyes I saw him," said he. "And, more: once, when you made a movement as if to go, he plucked you by the sleeve of your little nightshirt—so—"—and he plucked my coat—"as if to hold you back, to keep you there listening to the music."

"He did that?"

"Mais oui."

"Ah, well," I said, with a laugh that was rather forced, "I suppose I was so taken up with the music that I did not see him. Let us walk on."

We walked on. I was perturbed. This, and the occurrence that day when I had seen little Carl in the forest of SÉnart, my father's death and all that had gone before, made me feel that there was something working in my life that I but dimly understood.

For the first time, fully, Von Lichtenberg's mad attempt at my destruction rose before me, and demanded an explanation on another basis than that of madness. He had brought up his daughter as a boy, for it had been prophesied that she would be slain as a girl—slain by a Saluce; and I was the last descendant of that family. Then the picture of Margaret von Lichtenberg rose before me, and its likeness to little Carl, and the fact of my own likeness to Philippe de Saluce, who had murdered Margaret so many years ago; and it was just then, walking down the Boulevard St. Michel, amidst the crush and turmoil, jostled by students and grisettes, beggars and thieves, that the question came before me: "Can the dead return? Has Margaret von Lichtenberg come back to this sad old world again as little Carl? Am I Philippe de Saluce?" And then like a pang through my heart came the recollection, the fact, that I had recognised the park of Lichtenberg as a thing I had seen once before. I had not recognised the Schloss, but even that fact was an indirect confirmation of my fantastic idea, for the Schloss had been rebuilt in 1703, and the murder of Margaret had occurred many years before that.

All these questions and ideas assailing my mind at once brought terror to my heart for a moment. Only for a moment. "Well?" said I to myself, "suppose this is true, what then? What is the world around me, dull and commonplace and sordid, even under its gold and glitter? I have seen the highest pleasures that life can give men in exchange for gold to-day in the Amber Salon of the CafÉ de Paris. I have seen an Emperor who has attained his ambition, and the futility and weariness of it all in his face. I have lost and left behind the only country where dreams are real and life worth living—childhood. I love the past; and should it come to me and surround me with its romance, should some mysterious fate call it up to me, should the end be tragedy even, then welcome, for one can only die; and what care I about death if I am given one draught from the water of romance in this arid desert of commonplace things which they call the world?"

I walked beside Franzius intoxicated: the woods of Lichtenberg were around me, the winds of some far-distant day were rocking the trees. Romance had touched me with her wand. I heard the Hunting-Song, the horn, the cries of the jÄgers; and now I was in the gallery of the Schloss, the sound of the violins was in my ears, the music that was holding me from death, the ghostly child was plucking at my sleeve. Ah, God! whoever has tasted the waters of romance like that will never want wine again.

And then the wand was withdrawn, and I was walking in the Boulevard St. Michel with Franzius.