rt. We would impersonate the characters of our own world--our
schoolfellows and masters, our parents, servants, friends--and carry
them through experiences and situations derived from our impressions
of real life. Perhaps we rather led them a dance; and I daresay those
we didn't like came in for a good deal of retributive justice. It was
a little universe, of which we were the arch-arbiters, our will the
final law.

I don't know whether all children lack humour; but I'm sure no
grown-up author-manager can take his business more seriously than I
took mine. Oh, I enjoyed it hugely; the hours I spent at it were
enraptured hours; but it was grim, grim earnest. After a while I began
to long for a less subjective public, a more various audience. I would
summon the servants, range them in chairs at one end of the room,
conceal myself behind the theatre, and spout the play with fervid
solemnity. And they would giggle, and make flippant commentaries, and
at my most impassioned climaxes burst into guffaws. My mice, as has
been said, were overfed and lazy, and I used to have to poke them
through their parts with sticks from the wings; but this was a detail
which a superior imagination should have accepted as one of the
conventions of the art. It made the servants laugh, however; and when
I would step to the front in person, and, with tears in my eyes,
beseech them to be sober, they would but laugh the louder. 'Bless you,
sir, they're only mice--_ce ne sont que des souris_,' the cook called
out on one such occasion. She meant it as an apology and a
consolation, but it was the unkindest cut of all. Only mice, indeed!
To me they had been a young gentleman and lady lost in the Desert of
Sahara, near to die for the want of water, and about to be attacked,
captured, and sold into slavery by a band of Bedouin Arabs. Ah, well,
the artist must steel himself to meet with indifference or derision
from the public, to be ignored, misunderstood, or jeered at; and to
rely for his real, his legitimate, reward on the pleasure he finds in
his work.

And now there befell a great change in my life. Our home in Paris was
broken up, and we moved to St. Petersburg. It was impossible to take
my mice with us; their cage would have hopelessly complicated our
impedimenta. So we gave them to the children of our concierge.
Mercedes, however, I was resolved I would not part with, and I carried
her all the way to the Russian capital by hand. In my heart I was