me I am writing I lived in an old-fashioned hotel on the
Boulevard, which an enterprising Belgian had lately bought and was
endeavouring to modernise; an old-fashioned hotel, that still clung to its
ancient character in the presence of half a dozen old people, who, for
antediluvian reasons, continue to dine on certain well-specified days at
the _table d'hote_. Fifteen years have passed away, and these old
people, no doubt, have joined their ancestors; but I can see them still
sitting in that _salle a manger_; the _buffets en vieux chene_;
the opulent candelabra _en style d'empire_; the waiter lighting the
gas in the pale Parisian evening. That white-haired man, that tall, thin,
hatchet-faced American, has dined at this _table d'hote_ for the last
thirty years--he is talkative, vain, foolish, and authoritative. The clean,
neatly-dressed old gentleman who sits by him, looking so much like a French
gentleman, has spent a great part of his life in Spain. With that piece of
news, and its subsequent developments, your acquaintance with him begins
and ends; the eyes, the fan, the mantilla, how it began, how it was broken
off, and how it began again. Opposite sits another French gentleman, with
beard and bristly hair. He spent twenty years of his life in India, and he
talks of his son who has been out there for the last ten, and who has just
returned home. There is the Italian comtesse of sixty summers, who dresses
like a girl of sixteen and smokes a cigar after dinner,--if there are not
too many strangers in the room. She terms a stranger any one whom she has
not seen at least once before. The little fat, neckless man, with the great
bald head, fringed below the ears with hair, is M. Duval. He is a dramatic
author--the author of a hundred and sixty plays. He does not intrude
himself on your notice, but when you speak to him on literary matters he
fixes a pair of tiny, sloe-like eyes on you, and talks affably of his
collaborateurs.

I was soon deeply interested in M. Duval, and I invited him to come to the
_cafe_ after dinner. I paid for his coffee and liqueurs, I offered him
a choice cigar. He did not smoke; I did. It was, of course, inevitable that
I should find out that he had not had a play produced for the last twenty
years, but then the aureole of the hundred and sixty was about his poor
bald head. I thought of the chances of life, he alluded to the war; and so
this unpleasantness was passed over, and we entered on more gen