‘This was the only thing wanted,’ said Desmoulin, who generally had some humorous remark in readiness for every situation.  ’Yesterday at the Grosvenor we were in the fosse de Vincennes, and now, as they say in the melodrama of “The Knights of the Fog” ("Les Chevaliers du Brouillard"*), we are “homeless wanderers stranded on the bridges of London."’

  * The French dramatic adaptation of Ainsworth’s ‘Jack Sheppard.’

The allusion to the fog roused M. Zola from his contemplation.

’But where is the Savoy Hotel, where I stayed in ‘93?’ he inquired.  ’It must be very near here.’

I pointed it out to him, and he was astonished.  ’Why, no—­that cannot be!  It is so large a place, and now it looks so small.  What is that huge building beside it?’

‘The Hotel Cecil,’ I replied.

Then again he shook his head in disapproval.  From an artistic standpoint he strongly objected to the huge caravansary on which builder Hobbs and pious Jabez Balfour spent so much of other people’s money.  Soaring massively and pretentiously into the sky it dwarfed everything around; and thus, in his opinion, utterly spoilt that part of the Embankment.

‘To think, too,’ said he, ’that you had such a site, here, along the river, and allowed it to be used for hotels and clubs, and so forth.  There was room for a Louvre here, and you want one badly; for your National Gallery, which I well remember visiting in ’93, is a most wretched affair architecturally.’

‘But I want to see rather more of the south side of the river,’ he added, after a pause.  ’I should like to ascertain if my lion is still there.  I recollect that there was some fog about on the morning after my arrival at the Savoy in ’93; and when I went to the window of my room I noticed the mist parting—­one mass of vapour ascending skyward, while the other still hovered over the river.  And, in the rent between, I espied a lion, poised in mid air.  It amused me vastly; and I called my wife, saying to her, “Come and see.  Here’s the British lion waiting to bid us good-day."’

We went to the end of the bridge and thence espied the lion which surmounts the brewery of that name.  M. Zola recognised it immediately.  Desmoulin would then have led us Strandward; but the Strand, said I, was about the most dangerous thoroughfare in all London for those who wished to escape recognition; so we went back over the bridge and again down the Waterloo road.

’I should like very much to send a line to Paris to-day to stop letters from going to the Grosvenor,’ said M. Zola.  ’Is there any place hereabouts where I could write a note?’

This question perplexed me, for the numerous facilities for letter-writing which are supplied by the cafes of Paris are conspicuously absent in London; and this I explained to M. Zola.  A postage stamp may often be procured at a public-house, but only now and again can one there obtain ink and paper.  However, I thought we might as well try the saloon bar of the York Hotel, which abuts on the famous ‘Poverty Corner,’ so much frequented by ladies and gentlemen of the ‘halls,’ when, sorely against their inclinations, they are ‘resting.’