However, his people had the grace to send him a little money now and then.  Enamoured of the South, of Provence, of its people, its life, its sunshine and its poetry, narrow-chested, tall and short-sighted, he strode along the streets and the lanes, his long feet projecting far in advance of his body, and his white nose and gingery moustache buried in an open book:  for he had the habit of reading as he walked.  How he avoided falling into precipices, off the quays, or down staircases is a great mystery.  The sides of his overcoat bulged out with pocket editions of various poets.  When not engaged in reading Virgil, Homer, or Mistral, in parks, restaurants, streets, and suchlike public places, he indited sonnets (in French) to the eyes, ears, chin, hair, and other visible perfections of a nymph called Therese, the daughter, honesty compels me to state, of a certain Madame Leonore who kept a small cafe for sailors in one of the narrowest streets of the old town.

No more charming face, clear-cut like an antique gem, and delicate in colouring like the petal of a flower, had ever been set on, alas! a somewhat squat body.  He read his verses aloud to her in the very cafe with the innocence of a little child and the vanity of a poet.  We followed him there willingly enough, if only to watch the divine Therese laugh, under the vigilant black eyes of Madame Leonore, her mother.  She laughed very prettily, not so much at the sonnets, which she could not but esteem, as at poor Henry’s French accent, which was unique, resembling the warbling of birds, if birds ever warbled with a stuttering, nasal intonation.

Our third partner was Roger P. de la S-, the most Scandinavian-looking of Provencal squires, fair, and six feet high, as became a descendant of sea-roving Northmen, authoritative, incisive, wittily scornful, with a comedy in three acts in his pocket, and in his breast a heart blighted by a hopeless passion for his beautiful cousin, married to a wealthy hide and tallow merchant.  He used to take us to lunch at their house without ceremony.  I admired the good lady’s sweet patience.  The husband was a conciliatory soul, with a great fund of resignation, which he expended on “Roger’s friends.”  I suspect he was secretly horrified at these invasions.  But it was a Carlist salon, and as such we were made welcome.  The possibility of raising Catalonia in the interest of the Rey netto, who had just then crossed the Pyrenees, was much discussed there.

Don Carlos, no doubt, must have had many queer friends (it is the common lot of all Pretenders), but amongst them none more extravagantly fantastic than the Tremolino Syndicate, which used to meet in a tavern on the quays of the old port.  The antique city of Massilia had surely never, since the days of the earliest Phoenicians, known an odder set of ship-owners.  We met to discuss and settle the plan of operations for each voyage of the Tremolino.  In these operations a banking-house, too, was concerned—­a very respectable banking-house.  But I am afraid I shall end by saying too much.  Ladies, too, were concerned (I am really afraid I am saying too much)—­all sorts of ladies, some old enough to know better than to put their trust in princes, others young and full of illusions.