Oh, caprice of a woman! To leave me like that in a moment of anger and jealousy, never to wait an explanation; to let fall what might be the curtain of eternal separation with a touch of her hand; to step away from me and vanish into that vast, vague, cruel land we call the world!

And I had held her so close to me! She was so entirely mine, the happiest dream that ever mortal dreamt, the most mysterious and beautiful.

She had taken the carriage which we left at the inn at Etiolles, and returned to Paris. That we discovered; but beyond that there was no word or sign to lead me.

I only knew that she was in Paris. Even of that I was not quite sure, for she may have used Paris only as a stage on her journey into the unknown.

But to Paris I came. I could not stay at Etiolles, even on the chance of her returning. I must go where she had gone. And I swore in my madness to find her, even though I searched Paris from the heights of Montmartre to the depths of the Seine.

And then, when I got to Paris, I found my hands idle and useless. I did not know, even, what name she had gone under during her metamorphosis. She who had no name—this ghost from the past!

At times I found myself wondering whether it was all a dream, an illusion of the brain. Whether I was mad. But actuality brought me to reason on this point. I had to answer the inquiries following the death of De Coigny. I had to appear before an examining magistrate, I and my seconds.

Felix Rebouton was the magistrate in question, the same who, if my memory serves me, conducted the inquiry on the death of Victor Noir.

He was a thin, tall man, in spectacles, a lawyer, not a man; a procÈs-verbal in a tightly buttoned frock-coat.

And I had to face this individual, who seemed less an individual than a roll of parchment, and, with my heart breaking and my thoughts elsewhere, answer questions relative to my relations with De Coigny.

"We have always hated each other, since boyhood. He lied about me, and I killed him," was my answer.

"This lady who arrived on the scene of the duel, and with whom you departed; where is she?"

"Ah, if you could tell me that," I replied, "I would give you every penny of my fortune."

"Her name?"

"She has no name."

"No name!"

"She is a ghost."

The man of parchment scratched his head and made a note, looked sideways through his spectacles at his clerk and at De Brissac and the other seconds who were in the room.

He thought I was mad. And he was not far wrong.

The inquiry was suspended for three weeks, and I was free to return to my misery and the streets of Paris.

I lived now in the streets. They were my only hope. From early morning till night I haunted the boulevards. Franzius had orders to telegraph to my club and to the Place VendÔme should any news reach the Pavilion, and the club porter grew weary of the inquiry: "Any telegram for me?"

Men began to avoid me as they do the stricken, the leprous, and the mad. I must have seemed mad, indeed, for ever wandering hither and thither, searching the crowded streets with eager eyes, scarcely answering if spoken to, careless and untidy in my dress, a phantom of myself. Like Poe's man of the crowd, I drifted about Paris, ever in the thick of the throng, seeking the most populous streets.

Impossible to tell in what quarter of the city caprice might have cast her, I sought her in all. Montmartre and La Villette, the Quartier Latin and the great boulevards: I dreaded only one thing—night.

Night, when my search must cease; night and the pitiless gas-lamps, the terrible gas-lamps. Then it was that light, the angel that all day had helped my search, became a devil, contracting itself, and spreading into a million heartless points to show me the darkness. Then it was that the stars burning in the clear sky above the city became part of my sorrow.

All things bright and all things fair were leagued against me, in that they fed the flame of my suffering; and the happiness and gaiety of others became the last insult of the world.

Then it was that Joubert showed himself in his true form. Not one word did he ever say to me, though my conduct, my manners, my disordered dress, must have given him food for the deepest speculation and disquiet. He would put out my clothes and attend to my wants, speak to me about ordinary topics, never heed my silence or my harsh replies. You see, he was an old soldier; he had seen men stricken so often that he knew the language and the signs of real grief and real suffering.

I lost count of the days, and from opium alone could I get any sleep. Absorbed in my grief, I took no heed of the events around me. I remember distinctly in cafÉs and at my club hearing men talking of the Hohenzollerns and the succession to the Spanish throne. Men talking vehemently about a subject which was to me as uninteresting and as unintelligible as algebra to a child. But I could feel the ferment and unrest around me.

On the 15th of July, at ten o'clock in the morning, I was passing across the Place de la Concorde, when a roar like the sound of a great and distant sea broke on the summer air. It came from the direction of the Rue St. HonorÉ. People were running across the Place de la Concorde, and pouring from the Rue de Rivoli and from the bridges. The Champs ElysÉes behind me had become alive with people; cabmen were standing up on the driving-seats of their carriages, waving their hats and shouting; windows of houses were alive and white with fluttering handkerchiefs; and now, again and again, came the storm of sound, unlike anything I had ever heard before, unlike anything I will ever hear again; wave after wave, storm after storm, and through it all the drums of a marching regiment.

The Ninety-first Regiment of the Line were marching down the Rue St. HonorÉ, bayonets fixed, haversacks filled, drums beating, and colours fluttering. Paris was marching with them. And then through the storm came the cry uttered by a thousand throats: "À Berlin! À Berlin!"

"What is it?" I asked of a passer-by.

"War has been declared with Prussia!"

"With Prussia?"

"Bismarck——" I did not hear what else he had to say, deafened and dazed by the roar that now surrounded me.

"À Berlin! À Berlin!"

War had been declared with Prussia. Oh, fatality!

Bismarck! At the name the gardens of Lichtenberg unrolled before me. I saw them stretching to the edges of the pine forests. I heard the rattle of little Carl's drum as he marched before us, the sound that had echoed through the years, to be amplified and converted into this.

War! Red war! And then, curiously, as I stood gazing and listening to the storm that was gathering to wreck the last of my hope, I saw something which I had forgotten for years, and which now came before me as a vivid picture: a great hand with a seal ring on the little finger, holding and half caressing the tiny hand of a child. The hand of Bismarck holding the hand of Eloise, as I saw it that day long ago in the hall of Schloss Lichtenberg. The iron hand which was to crush the armies of France and fling Napoleon from his throne.

I elbowed my way through the crush towards the Place VendÔme. My own affairs were dwarfed, for the moment, by the magnitude of the event and the furnace roar of the rejoicing city. Jubilant and ferocious, lustful and bloodthirsty, triumphant as the blare of a trumpet, terrible as the voice of a tiger, the gusts of sound swept the heavens. It was the voice of the Second Empire, not the voice of a people; it was cruelty, lust, and organised vice crying aloud to God for blood.

God heard it, and made swift answer.

I arrived at the Place VendÔme to find a surprise awaiting me.

Franzius and Eloise were there. They had brought luggage with them, which was in the hall. The servant who opened the door for me told me they were in the library, and I ran there to meet them.

"Toto," cried Eloise; then, holding me at a little distance and staring at me as though I were a ghost: "What has happened to you?"

I caught a reflection of myself in the mirror above the fireplace, and for the first time I recognised the change in myself. Haggard, white, and drawn, my face was no longer the face of a young man.

"Never mind me," I replied. "Why have you left Etiolles? Have you any news?"

"My friend," said Franzius, answering for her, "there is no news—only news of war."

"Ah, yes," I said. "War. But tell me why you have left Etiolles?"

"I am a Prussian," replied Franzius; "and we are returning."

"Returning?"

"To my own country."

"You are leaving me?"

There was silence for a moment, and Eloise began to weep.

"Toto, can't you see?"

"Ah, yes," I said; "I can see—everything is going from me. Don't cry, Eloise; I can see. Franzius, forgive me. I forgot. I did not know what war meant till now."

Up to this I had seen war through the stories told in books. I had seen war on the canvases in the Luxembourg and the Louvre. But up till now, standing there in the library before Franzius, with his overcoat on his arm, and Eloise weeping, I had not seen war.

Oh, yes; it is very grand: the long lines of infantry going into action, the clouds of cavalry, the roar of the cannon, and the drums beating the charge!

But that is not war. War is voiceless.

Yesterday we were at peace. To-day we are at war. Something has entered into every heart and into every home; a million tiny fingers are busy snapping a million bonds of union. Blow trumpets and beat drums how you please, you cannot chase away the silence which has entered into the hearts of men, or the foreboding that tells us the great curse has come again.

"It is not even that we must go," said Franzius, "but that we must go at once. We are not going; we are driven forth. My friend, we will meet again, when it is over."

"When it is over," I said mechanically.

They had received their passports, and they told me of their plans. Franzius was beyond the age of military service. They would go to Frankfort, where he had some relations. He had plenty of money with which to live quietly till "it was over" and the world could hear music again.

I ordered a carriage to the door, and accompanied them to the station, through streets packed and crowded as if by some fÊte.

The station was thronged, and the train for the frontier was on the point of starting when we arrived. I have never seen such a crowd before. Families and their belongings, small tradesmen, Germans who had been prospering yesterday and who to-day, ruined and hopeless, were being driven forth back to their own country to starve. The buffet had been stripped of food; and when I thought of the long journey before my friends and the chances of the road, my heart misgave me, till Eloise showed me a basket that had been packed for them by Madame Ancelot.

Just as the train was starting, I jostled against a vendor of oranges who still had a few unsold. I bought them and gave them to Eloise.

I could not help remembering the day we had gone down first to Evry, she and I, and the oranges I had bought for her in the Boulevard St. Michel. That day, in spring!

"Good-bye! Good-bye!"

Eloise had squeezed herself through the window beside Franzius; the train moved away; the people who were leaving said a last good-bye to the people they had left, to friends who had cared for them till war came as a separation, to brother Germans who were bound to depart by the next train. I never heard so mournful a sound as that when the great train drew away for its journey into for ever, leaving me alone on the platform.

I came back on foot. It was a long way; and as I passed the crowded cafÉs, the crowds of excited and fever-stricken people, it seemed to me that I was in a city whose inhabitants had at one stroke gone mad.

I found myself, for the first time in many days, able to note the things around me, and to take some interest in them. The great upheaval had shaken me in part away from my own especial preoccupation, the grief of the parting with Eloise and Franzius had obscured in part that other grief which had pursued me.

The great city had been stirred to its uttermost depths, as the great sea is sometimes stirred by a submarine explosion. Dregs came to the surface and floated as scum; and I saw people that day in the streets that I had never seen before: terrible people, cast up from the purlieus and the slums, dog-men and beast-women, such as insulted the light of heaven during the Terror; faces that might have served Retzsch for his picture of the fiend, or Calot for his fantastic devil-drawings. Collette la Charonne, Mathurine Giroron, Elizabeth Trouvain, the capon and the franc-mitou from the past, elbowed the bully of the barrier and the fishwife from the Halles of the present.

At the word "War" Mathias Hungadi Spiculi rose from his long sleep, just as he had risen at the word "Revolution." All the elements of the Commune were there that day, shouting France to war, and ready to dance on her ruins.

Even the bourgeoisie, the placid people, the cafÉ loungers, were changed. The tiger-cat which lies at the heart of the Latin races, the animal that spits, and snarls, and howls, was unchained at last; and the joyful ferocity of the women was a thing to see and to remember. It was the uprising of the pampered beast, the beast that had sunned itself for years in prosperity. Long ages of insult might have condoned what I saw that day, but the circumstances never.

Bands of women arm-in-arm, students, waving the tricolour, cabs and carriages crowded with people driving nowhere, anywhere, so that they could find a new place to shout in, girls with men's hats on their heads, men with women's bonnets—it was Mabille, into which the beasts of the Jardin des Plantes had broken; La Closerie des Lilas on an infinite scale, roofed with sky.

And, beyond the Vosges, at his desk, quite unmoved, with a cigar in his mouth and a folio in his hand, was sitting Bismarck, secure in everything, possessed of everything, from the Erbswurst for the Prussian cooking-pot to the guns that were to batter down Paris.

I have said little about my social life in Paris, but I have indicated, I think, that my guardian and I were friends of the Emperor's; and I mention it as a strange fact, and a fact that casts volumes of light on his character, that now, in my desolation, deserted by my guardian, deserted by Franzius and Eloise, deserted by everyone I loved, the image of Napoleon arose before me as a person I would like to speak to. You know just what I mean. There is generally amongst one's friends some person, some homely individual, some good man or good woman, to whom we go when in affliction for a word of consolation, or even just to feel their presence. We look in and see them, even though we may say nothing of our troubles. Moved by this instinct, I resolved to look in and see the Emperor. To get near the Tuileries was a difficult business, and even to pass the Cent Gardes at the gate, but once inside, things were easier.

The Emperor had come to Paris from the Council at Saint Cloud, held the night before. I do not know whether the Empress accompanied him or not, but he was in the palace, and the great hall was thronged.

The excitement of the streets was here, too, though in a more subdued form. Men were talking and laughing; everyone felt, or seemed to feel, that some great good fortune was impending. As a matter of fact, the war seemed to promise a "move up" all round. Honour to France, showers of gold and decorations from those painted skies which Hope rears so pleasantly above fools, and, above all, change.

Most of these men were money-changers at heart; corrupt, vicious, ready to devour, true children of the Second Empire, descendants of the clique of rogues which manipulated the coup d'État, sent Hugo to exile, and flung France into the net spread by parasites, financiers, and corrupt politicians. France with her foot on the neck of Germany seemed to promise fabulous things to these. They had much, and they wanted more. They craved for change—and they got it.

Amidst the crowd, which included some of the greatest names in France, it seemed hopeless for me to seek an audience. But I knew the place. I saw the Palace Prefect, Baron Vareigne. He had just shaken himself free from half a dozen men, and was making off down a corridor when I tacked myself on to him.

"See him? Impossible! For a moment?—just to pay your respects? Oh, well, only for a moment, then. You will be a change from the others. He just said to me: 'For Heaven's sake, let in no more generals!'"

And, with a click of a door-handle, there he was before me, seated in full uniform, which did not seem to fit him, the eternal cigarette smouldering between his lips, just the same old gentleman who had received my guardian and me so courteously that day; just the same useless, shuffling manner, the nasal voice, the half-closed eyes, crafty yet kindly—rising to meet me with a little, subdued laugh, half cynical, as though thanking God I were not another general. He bade me be seated, and told me he was not in a hurry, but being hurried, and looked over some papers that Vareigne handed him, and said: "Yes, yes," and flicked some cigarette-ash off his trousers. He talked to me for a few minutes, asking after the Vicomte de Chatellan, and then dismissed me, pushing me out of the cabinet with a kindly hand on my shoulder, and a kindly wish to see me again—aprÈs.

This was the true Napoleon, the man kind to all, the injudicious man who made those unfortunate children half drunk at the children's party at Biarritz, the man who loved his little son so well, the man who would put a fistful of gold in a poor man's pocket, just because it was a poor man's pocket: I say, this was the true Napoleon. For what shall you measure a man by, when all is said and done, if not by his heart? Ah! how I would have loved that man if he had been my father!

When I left the Tuileries I remembered the fact that I had not eaten since morning. I went to a cafÉ and dined after a fashion. I returned home late; and as I entered the hall the servant who took my hat, said: "A lady called an hour ago to see monsieur."

"A lady to see me?"

"Yes, monsieur. I told her that you had gone to Etiolles, to the Pavilion of Saluce, and she ordered her coachman to drive there."

I remember, now, that when I started to see Franzius and Eloise off at the station I had said to the servant that I might go to Saluce, and if I did not return I would be there.

"What was she like?"

"Madame was quite young, tall, dark, and—very beautiful."

"Good God!" I said. "Why did I not return an hour sooner! Quick! Send me Joubert!"