more easily obtainable in the Quartier Montparnasse than in the
neighbourhood of the Six Bells and the Arts Club, Chelsea.

We found the doctor and the sculptor.

The hotel was informed that Camilla was ill, and that the symptom
pointed to typhoid fever. Naturally, she kept her room. That day the
sculptor, a young American, who said that a thing was 'bully' when he
meant it was good, arrived, and took a mask of Camilla's head. By the
way, this was a most tedious and annoying process. The two straws
through which the poor girl had to breathe while her face was covered
with that white stuff--! Oh, well, I needn't go into that.

The next day typhoid fever was definitely announced. Hotels generally
prefer these things to be kept secret, but we published it
everywhere--it was part of our plan. In a few hours the entire Rue St.
Augustin was aware that the English bride recently arrived from London
was down with typhoid fever.

The disease ran its course. Sometimes Camilla was better, sometimes
worse. Then all of a sudden a haemorrhage supervened, and the young wife
died, and the young husband was stricken with trouble and grief. The
whole street mourned. The death even got into the Paris dailies, and the
correspondence column of the Paris edition of the _New York Herald_ was
filled with outcries against the impurities of Parisian water.

It was colossal. I laughed, Polycarp.

My mind unhinged by sorrow, I insisted on taking the corpse to London
for burial. I had a peculiar affection for the Brompton Cemetery, though
neither her ancestors nor mine had been buried there. I insisted on
Darcy accompanying me. The procession left the Rue St. Augustin, and the
hotel was disinfected. This alone cost me a thousand francs. I gave the
sculptor one thousand five hundred, and the doctor two thousand. Then
there were the expenses of the journey with the coffin. I forget the
figure, but I know it was prodigious.

But I was content. For, of course, Camilla was not precisely in that
coffin. Camilla had not been suffering from precisely typhoid fever. In
strict fact, she had never been ill the least bit in the world. In
strict fact, she had been spirited out of the hotel one night, and at
the very moment when her remains were crossing the Channel in charge of
an inconsolable widower, she was in the middle of the Mediterranean on a
steamer. The coffin contained a really wonderful imitation of her
outward form, modelled and coloured by