once led the way into a salon on the ground-floor looking over
the garden.

Here we found ourselves in a large low room containing some thirty or
forty tables, and fitted up after the universal restaurant pattern, with
cheap-looking glasses, rows of hooks, and spittoons in due number. The
air was heavy with the combined smells of many dinners, and noisy with
the clatter of many tongues. Behind the fruits, cigars, and liqueur
bottles that decorated the _comptoir_ sat a plump, black-eyed little
woman in a gorgeous cap and a red silk dress. This lady welcomed us with
a bewitching smile and a gracious inclination of the head.

"_Ces messieurs_," she said, "will find a vacant table yonder, by the
window."

Mueller bowed majestically.

"Madame," he said, "I wish to see Monsieur le proprietaire."

The dame de comptoir looked very uneasy.

"If Monsieur has any complaint to make," she said, "he can make it to
me."

"Madame, I have none."

"Or if it has reference to the ordering of a dinner...."

Mueller smiled loftily.

"Dinner, Madame," he said, with a disdainful gesture, "is but one of the
accidents common to humanity. A trifle! A trifle always
humiliating--sometimes inconvenient--occasionally impossible. No,
Madame, mine is a serious mission; a mission of the highest importance,
both socially and commercially. May I beg that you will have the
goodness to place my card in the hands of Monsieur le proprietaire, and
say that I request the honor of five minutes' interview."

The little woman's eyes had all this time been getting rounder and
blacker. She was evidently confounded by my friend's grandiloquence.

"_Ah! mon Dieu! M'sieur_," she said, nervously, "my husband is in the
kitchen. It is a busy day with us, you understand--but I will send
for him."

And she forthwith despatched a waiter for "Monsieur Choucru."

Mueller seized me by the arm.

"Heavens!" he exclaimed, in a very audible aside, "did you hear? She is
his wife! She is Madame Choucru?"

"Well, and what of that?"

"What of that, indeed? _Mais, mon ami_, how can you ask the question?
Have you no eyes? Look at her! Such a remarkably handsome woman--such a
_tournure_--such eyes--such a figure for an illustration! Only conceive
the effect of Madame Choucru--in medallion!"

"Oh, magnificent!" I replied. "Magnificent--in medallion."

But I could not, for the life of me, imagine what he was driving at.

"And it would make the fortune of the _Tois