use of the tragic memories that haunt it; in the foreground
were my companions agreeably playing the fool and posing as living
statues on the broken columns: he whose solemnity of demeanour accorded
with his belief that his real sphere was the pulpit, throwing out an
unaccustomed leg as Mercury on one column, and on another the Architect,
an apologetic Apollo in frock coat with silk hat for lyre. In my
lightheartedness, and accustomed to the ways of the English, I thought
them absurd but funny. A French family, however, who passed by chance
looked as if they wondered, as the French have wondered for centuries,
at the sadness with which the Englishman takes his pleasures.

Beardsley was one of the party. It was the first time he was with us in
Paris, the first time, for that matter, he had ever been there. He had
clutched beforehand, like the youth he was, at the pleasure the visit
promised, and I remember his joy in coming to tell me of it one morning
in Buckingham Street. I remember too how amazing I thought it that, when
he got there, he seemed at once to know Paris in the mysterious way he
knew everything.

We had not heard of his arrival until we ran across him at the
_Vernissage_ in the New _Salon_. I think he had planned the dramatic
effect of the chance meeting, counting upon the impression he would make
as we met. I have said he was always a good deal of a dandy and I could
see at what pains he had been to invent the costume he thought Paris and
art demanded of him. He was in grey, a harmony carefully and quite
exquisitely carried out, grey coat, grey waistcoat, grey trousers, grey
Suede gloves, grey soft felt hat, grey tie which, in compliment to the
French, was large and loose. An impression of this grey elegance is in
the portrait of him by Blanche, painted, I think, the same year. As he
came through the galleries towards us with the tripping step that was
characteristic of him, a little light cane swinging in his hand, he was
the most striking figure in them, dividing the stares of the staring
_Vernissage_ crowd with the _clou_ of the year's New _Salon_: that
portrait by Aman-Jean of his wife, with her hair parted in the middle
and brought simply down over her ears, which set a mode copied before
the season was over by women it disfigured, heroines who could dare the
unbecoming if fashion decreed it. Beardsley knew he was being stared at
and of course liked it, and probably would not have exchanged places
w