en where there
was a lawn of English greenness, on which were children and nurses
and many dogs, and young people who played at the lawn-tennis.

"The door of the house was opened by a charming young woman in black
with a white apron and cap, like a waitress at the Bouillon Duval,
who guided me through a bright corridor full of pictures and
panoplies, and then through a handsome studio to a billiard-room,
where M. Josselin was playing at _the_ billiard to himself all
alone.

"M. Josselin receives me with jovial cordiality; he is enormously
tall, enormously handsome, like a drum-major of the Imperial Guard,
except that his lip and chin are shaved and he has slight whiskers;
very well dressed, with thick curly hair, and regular features, and
a singularly sympathetic voice: he is about thirty-five.

"I have to decline a game of billiards, and refuse a cigar, a very
formidable cigar, very black and very thick and very long. I don't
smoke, and am no hand at a cue. Besides, I want to talk about
_Etoiles Mortes_, about _Les Trepassees de Francois Villon_, about
_Dejanire et Dalila_!

[Illustration: "'HE PRESENTS ME FIRST TO MADAME JOSSELIN'"]

"M. Josselin speaks French as he writes it, in absolute perfection;
his mother, he tells me, was from Normandy--the daughter of
fisherfolk in Dieppe; he was at school in Paris, and has lived there
as an art student.

"He does not care to talk about _Les Trepassees_ or _Les Etoiles_,
or any of his immortal works.

"He asks me if I'm a good swimmer, and can do _la coupe_ properly;
and leaning over his billiard-table he shows me how it ought to be
done, and dilates on the merits of that mode of getting through the
water. He confides to me that he suffers from a terrible
nostalgia--a consuming desire to do _la coupe_ in the swimming-baths
of Passy against the current; to take a header _a la hussarde_ with
his eyes open and explore the bed of the Seine between Grenelle and
the Ile des Cygnes--as he used to do when he was a school-boy--and
pick up mussels with his teeth.

"Then he explains to me the peculiar virtues of his stove, which is
almost entirely an invention of his own, and shows me how he can
regulate the heat of the room to the fraction of a degree
centigrade, which he prefers to Fahrenheit--just as he prefers
metres an