h rejoicing faces. The boulevards rang to their laughter--all Paris
laughed!

For seven days I sat there at the appointed times, meeting the eye
of nobody, and lifting my coffee with fingers which trembled with
embarrassment at this too great conspicuosity! Those mournful hours
passed, one by the year, while the idling bourgeois and the travellers
made ridicule; and the rabble exhausted all effort to draw plays of wit
from me.

I have told you that I carried no placard, that my costume was elegant,
my demeanour modest in all degree.

"How, then, this excitement?" would be your disposition to inquire. "Why
this sensation?"

It is very simple. My hair had been shaved off, all over my ears,
leaving only a little above the back of the neck, to give an appearance
of far-reaching baldness, and on my head was painted, in ah! so
brilliant letters of distinctness:

Theatre

Folie-Rouge

Revue

de

Printemps

Tous les Soirs

Such was the necessity to which I was at that time reduced! One has
heard that the North Americans invent the most singular advertising,
but I will not believe they surpass the Parisian. Myself, I say I cannot
express my sufferings under the notation of the crowds that moved about
the Cafe' de la Paix! The French are a terrible people when they
laugh sincerely. It is not so much the amusing things which cause
them amusement; it is often the strange, those contrasts which contain
something horrible, and when they laugh there is too frequently some
person who is uncomfortable or wicked. I am glad that I was born not a
Frenchman; I should regret to be native to a country where they invent
such things as I was doing in the Place de l'Opera; for, as I tell you,
the idea was not mine.

As I sat with my eyes drooping before the gaze of my terrible and
applauding audiences, how I mentally formed cursing words against the
day when my misfortunes led me to apply at the Theatre Folie-Rouge for
work! I had expected an audition and a role of comedy in the Revue; for,
perhaps lacking any experience of the stage, I am a Neapolitan by birth,
though a resident of the Continent at large since the age of fifteen.
All Neapolitans can act; all are actors; comedians of the greatest,
as every traveller is cognizant. There is a thing in the air of
our beautiful slopes which makes the people of a great instinctive
musicalness and deceptiveness, with passions like those burning in
the o