At the time I am writing I lived in an old-fashioned hotel on the Boulevard, which an enterprising Belgian had lately bought and was endeavouring to modernise; an old-fashioned hotel, that still clung to its ancient character in the presence of half a dozen old people, who, for antediluvian reasons, continue to dine on certain well-specified days at the table d’hote.  Fifteen years have passed away, and these old people, no doubt, have joined their ancestors; but I can see them still sitting in that salle a manger; the buffets en vieux chene; the opulent candelabra en style d’empire; the waiter lighting the gas in the pale Parisian evening.  That white-haired man, that tall, thin, hatchet-faced American, has dined at this table d’hote for the last thirty years—­he is talkative, vain, foolish, and authoritative.  The clean, neatly-dressed old gentleman who sits by him, looking so much like a French gentleman, has spent a great part of his life in Spain.  With that piece of news, and its subsequent developments, your acquaintance with him begins and ends; the eyes, the fan, the mantilla, how it began, how it was broken off, and how it began again.  Opposite sits another French gentleman, with beard and bristly hair.  He spent twenty years of his life in India, and he talks of his son who has been out there for the last ten, and who has just returned home.  There is the Italian comtesse of sixty summers, who dresses like a girl of sixteen and smokes a cigar after dinner,—­if there are not too many strangers in the room.  She terms a stranger any one whom she has not seen at least once before.  The little fat, neckless man, with the great bald head, fringed below the ears with hair, is M. Duval.  He is a dramatic author—­the author of a hundred and sixty plays.  He does not intrude himself on your notice, but when you speak to him on literary matters he fixes a pair of tiny, sloe-like eyes on you, and talks affably of his collaborateurs.

I was soon deeply interested in M. Duval, and I invited him to come to the cafe after dinner.  I paid for his coffee and liqueurs, I offered him a choice cigar.  He did not smoke; I did.  It was, of course, inevitable that I should find out that he had not had a play produced for the last twenty years, but then the aureole of the hundred and sixty was about his poor bald head.  I thought of the chances of life, he alluded to the war; and so this unpleasantness was passed over, and we entered on more genial subjects of conversation.  He had written plays with everybody; his list of collaborateurs was longer than any list of lady patronesses for an English county ball; there was no literary kitchen in which he had not helped to dish up.  I was at once amazed and delighted.  Had M. Duval written his hundred and sixty plays in the seclusion of his own rooms, I should have been less surprised; it was the mystery of the seances of collaboration, the rendezvous,