—Boulevarde     

  

       N my window-sill lies a faded rose, a rose plucked from an English lane. As I write, my eyes fall upon the gardens, the forests, around my ancestral chateau, but the faint scent is an English perfume. To the land of that rose, the land that sheltered, befriended, amused me, I dedicate these memoirs of my sojourn there.     

       They are a record of incidents and impressions that sometimes have little connection one with another beyond the possession of one character in       common-myself. I am that individual who with unsteady feet will tread the tight-rope, dance among the eggs, leap through the paper tambourine—in a word, play clown and hero to the melody of the castanets. I hold out my hat that you may drop in a sou should you chance to be amused. To the serious I herewith bid adieu, for instruction, I fear, will be conspicuously absent, unless, indeed, my follies serve as a warning.     

       And now without further prologue I raise the curtain.     

       The first scene is a railway carriage swiftly travelling farther and       farther from the sea that washes the dear shores of France. Look out of the window and behold the green fields, the heavy hedge-rows enclosing them so tightly, the trees, not in woods, but scattered everywhere as by a restless forester, the brick farms, the hop-fields, the moist, vaporous atmosphere of England.     

       Cast your eyes within and you will see, wrapped in an ulster of a British pattern concealing all that is not British in his appearance, an exile from his native land. Not to make a mystery of this individual, you will see, indeed, myself. And I—why did I travel thus enshrouded, why did       my eye look with melancholy upon this fertile landscape, why did I sit sad and sombre as I travelled through this strange land? There were many things fresh and novel to stir the mind of an adventurer. The name, the platform, the look of every station we sped past, was a little piece of England, curious in its way. Many memories of the people and the places I had known in fiction should surely have been aroused and lit my heart with some enthusiasm. What reason, then, for sadness?     

       I shall tell you, since the affair is now no secret, and as it hereafter touches my narrative. I was a 

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