n the world. Into what
career could I throw myself, and, while obtaining a livelihood, avoid
discovery? I knew various things, in that smattering sort of way which,
by the aid of puffing and notoriety, often succeeds with the world; but
yet notoriety was the very thing I most dreaded! There was nothing for
it but to change my name. Many would doubtless say that this was not any
great sacrifice,--need not have cost me any very poignant sufferings;
but they would be wrong. I had clung to my name through all the changes
and vicissitudes of my fortune, as though it embodied my very identity.
It was to make that humble name a great one that I had toiled and
struggled through my whole life. In that obscure name lay the whole
impulse of my darings. Take that from me, and you took away the energy
that sustained me, and I sunk down into the mere adventurer, living on
from day to day, and hour to hour, without purpose or ambition. I had
borne my name in the very lowest passages of my fortune, hoping one day
or other to contrast these dark periods with the brilliant hours of my
destiny. And now I must abandon it! "Well, be it so," thought I, "and,
by way of compromise, I 'll keep half of it, and call myself Monsieur
Corneille; and as to nationality, there need be little difficulty.
Whenever a man talks indifferent Spanish, he says he is from the Basque.
If he speaks bad German, he calls himself an Austrian. So I, if there be
any irregularities in my regular verbs, will coolly assert that I am a
brave Beige and a subject of King Leopold; and if humility be a virtue,
this choice of a native land ought to do me credit."

I raised my head from my musings at this moment, and found myself at
the corner of the Rue Goguenarde, exactly opposite a house covered with
placards and announcements, from the street to the third story, a great
board with gilt letters, over the entrance, proclaiming it the "Bureau
des Affiches" for all nations. Nor was the universality a mere pretence,
as a single glance could show the range of advertisements, taking in
everything, from an estate in Guadaloupe to a neat chamber in the
Marais; from a foundry at Lyons to the sweeping of a passage in the Rue
Rivoli. All the nostrums of medicine, all the cheap appliances of the
toilet, remedies against corpulence, perventives to extreme emaciation,
how to grow hair, how to get rid of it, governesses, ballet-dancers,
even ladies "with suitable portions and great personal