surrounded it unless the door were
open.

But besides M. Eugene Valmont, dressed in elegant attire as if he were
still a boulevardier of Paris, occupier of the top floor in the
Imperial Flats, there was another Frenchman in London to whom I must
introduce you, namely, Professor Paul Ducharme, who occupied a squalid
back room in the cheapest and most undesirable quarter of Soho.
Valmont flatters himself he is not yet middle-aged, but poor Ducharme
does not need his sparse gray beard to proclaim his advancing years.
Valmont vaunts an air of prosperity; Ducharme wears the shabby
habiliments and the shoulder-stoop of hopeless poverty. He shuffles
cringingly along the street, a compatriot not to be proud of. There
are so many Frenchmen anxious to give lessons in their language, that
merely a small living is to be picked up by any one of them. You will
never see the spruce Valmont walking alongside the dejected Ducharme.

'Ah!' you exclaim, 'Valmont in his prosperity has forgotten those less
fortunate of his nationality.'

Pardon, my friends, it is not so. Behold, I proclaim to you, the
exquisite Valmont and the threadbare Ducharme are one and the same
person. That is why they do not promenade together. And, indeed, it
requires no great histrionic art on my part to act the role of the
miserable Ducharme, for when I first came to London, I warded off
starvation in this wretched room, and my hand it was that nailed to
the door the painted sign 'Professor Paul Ducharme, Teacher of the
French Language'. I never gave up the room, even when I became
prosperous and moved to Imperial Flats, with its concealed chamber of
horrors unknown to British authority. I did not give up the Soho
chamber principally for this reason: Paul Ducharme, if the truth were
known about him, would have been regarded as a dangerous character;
yet this was a character sometimes necessary for me to assume. He was
a member of the very inner circle of the International, an anarchist
of the anarchists. This malign organisation has its real headquarters
in London, and we who were officials connected with the Secret Service
of the Continent have more than once cursed the complacency of the
British Government which allows such a nest of vipers to exist
practically unmolested. I confess that before I came to know the
English people as well as I do now, I thought that this complacency
was due to utter selfishness, because the anarchists never commit an
outrage i