but treasured it as if it had been an
impapyrated kiss. "_Joie de mon ame_," wrote Paragot, "I have seen the
doorstep which your little feet so adored touch lightly every day." I
like that better. But this is the opinion of the Asticot of a hundred
and fifty. The Asticot of fourteen could not contrast: for him sufficed
the Absolute of the romance of Paragot's love-making. Yet I did have a
standard of comparison--Ferdinand, whom till then I had regarded as the
Prince of Lovers. But he paled into the most prosaic young man before
the newly illuminated Paragot, and as for Miranda I sent her packing
from her throne in my heart and Joanna reigned in her stead. Little
idiot that I was, I set to dreaming of Joanna. You may not like the
name, but to me it held and still holds unspeakable music.

The other papers, as I have said, were records of travel, and I
instinctively recognized that they referred to subsequent Joanna-less
days. They were written on the backs of bills in outlandish languages,
leaves torn from greasy note-books, waste stuff exhaling exotic odours,
and odds and scraps of paper indescribable. In after years in Paris I
besought Paragot, almost on my knees, to write an account of the years
of vagabondage to which these papers refer. It would make, I told him, a
_picaresque_ romance compared with which that of Gil Bias de Santillane
were the tale of wanderings round a village pump. Such, said I, is given
to few men to produce. But Paragot only smiled, and sipped his absinthe.
It was against his principles, he said. The world would be a gentler
habitat if there had never been written or graven record of a human
action, and he refused to pander to the obscene curiosity of the
multitude as to the thoughts and doings of an entire stranger. Besides,
literary composition was beset with too many difficulties. One's method
of expression had always to be in evening dress which he abhorred, and
he could not abide the violet ink and pin-pointed pens supplied in cafes
and places where one writes. So the world has lost a new Odyssey.

The notes formed reading as disconnected as a dictionary. They were so
abrupt. Incidents were noted which stimulated my young imagination like
stinging-nettles; and then nothing more.

"As soon as Hedwige had taught me German, she grew sick and tired of me;
and when she wanted to marry an under-officer of cavalry with moustaches
reaching to the top of his _Pikelhaube_, who tried to run me thro