been drawn to the salon by Marianina's enchanting voice.

"I have been cold for the last minute or two," said a lady near the door
to her neighbor.

The stranger, who was standing near the speaker, moved away.

"This is very strange! now I am warm," she said, after his departure.
"Perhaps you will call me mad, but I cannot help thinking that my
neighbor, the gentleman in black who just walked away, was the cause of
my feeling cold."

Ere long the exaggeration to which people in society are naturally
inclined, produced a large and growing crop of the most amusing ideas,
the most curious expressions, the most absurd fables concerning this
mysterious individual. Without being precisely a vampire, a ghoul, a
fictitious man, a sort of Faust or Robin des Bois, he partook of the
nature of all these anthropomorphic conceptions, according to those
persons who were addicted to the fantastic. Occasionally some
German would take for realities these ingenious jests of Parisian
evil-speaking. The stranger was simply _an old man_. Some young men, who
were accustomed to decide the future of Europe every morning in a few
fashionable phrases, chose to see in the stranger some great criminal,
the possessor of enormous wealth. Novelists described the old man's life
and gave some really interesting details of the atrocities committed by
him while he was in the service of the Prince of Mysore. Bankers, men of
a more positive nature, devised a specious fable.

"Bah!" they would say, shrugging their broad shoulders pityingly, "that
little old fellow's a _Genoese head_!"

"If it is not an impertinent question, monsieur, would you have the
kindness to tell me what you mean by a Genoese head?"

"I mean, monsieur, that he is a man upon whose life enormous sums
depend, and whose good health is undoubtedly essential to the
continuance of this family's income. I remember that I once heard a
mesmerist, at Madame d'Espard's, undertake to prove by very specious
historical deductions, that this old man, if put under the magnifying
glass, would turn out to be the famous Balsamo, otherwise called
Cagliostro. According to this modern alchemist, the Sicilian had escaped
death, and amused himself making gold for his grandchildren. And the
Bailli of Ferette declared that he recognized in this extraordinary
personage the Comte de Saint-Germain."

Such nonsense as this, put forth with the assumption of superior
cleverness, with the air of raillery, whi