PART ONE


CHAPTER I


Certain streets have an atmosphere of their own, a sort of universal fame
and the particular affection of their citizens. One of such streets is
the Cannebière, and the jest: “If Paris had a Cannebière it would be a
little Marseilles” is the jocular expression of municipal pride. I, too,
I have been under the spell. For me it has been a street leading into
the unknown.

There was a part of it where one could see as many as five big cafés in a
resplendent row. That evening I strolled into one of them. It was by no
means full. It looked deserted, in fact, festal and overlighted, but
cheerful. The wonderful street was distinctly cold (it was an evening of
carnival), I was very idle, and I was feeling a little lonely. So I went
in and sat down.

The carnival time was drawing to an end. Everybody, high and low, was
anxious to have the last fling. Companies of masks with linked arms and
whooping like red Indians swept the streets in crazy rushes while gusts
of cold mistral swayed the gas lights as far as the eye could reach.
There was a touch of bedlam in all this.

Perhaps it was that which made me feel lonely, since I was neither
masked, nor disguised, nor yelling, nor in any other way in harmony with
the bedlam element of life. But I was not sad. I was merely in a state
of sobriety. I had just returned from my second West Indies voyage. My
eyes were still full of tropical splendour, my memory of my experiences,
lawful and lawless, which had their charm and their thrill; for they had
startled me a little and had amused me considerably. But they had left
me untouched. Indeed they were other men’s adventures, not mine. Except
for a little habit of responsibility which I had acquired they had not
matured me. I was as young as before. Inconceivably young—still
beautifully unthinking—infinitely receptive.

You may believe that I was not thinking of Don Carlos and his fight for a
kingdom. Why should I? You don’t want to think of things which you meet
every day in the newspapers and in conversation. I had paid some calls
since my return and most of my acquaintance were legitimists and
intensely interested in the events of the frontier of Spain, for
political, religious, or romantic reasons. But I was not interested.
Apparently I was not romantic enough. Or was it that I was even more
romantic than all those good people? The affair seemed to me
commonplace. That man was attending to his business of a Pretender.

On the front page of the illustrated paper I saw lying on a table near
me, he looked picturesque enough, seated on a boulder, a big strong man
with a square-cut beard, his hands resting on the hilt of a cavalry
sabre—and all around him a landscape of savage mountains. He caught my
eye on that spiritedly composed woodcut. (There were no inane
snapshot-reproductions in those days.) It was the obvious romance for
the use of royalists but it arrested my attention.

Just then some masks from outside invaded the café, dancing hand in hand
in a single file led by a burly man with a cardboard nose. He gambolled
in wildly and behind him twenty others perhaps, mostly Pierrots and
Pierrettes holding each other by the hand and winding in and out between
the chairs and tables: eyes shining in the holes of cardboard faces,
breasts panting; but all preserving a mysterious silence.