As the afternoon advanced, a yellow summer sun, sinking to a level with the upper fringes of the city haze, gave a signal for farewells; and little groups retired to quieter corners for good-byes.  There was a good deal of worrying about submarines; one heard fragments of conversations—­“They never trouble the Bordeaux route”—­“Absolutely safe, je t’assure”; and in the accents of Iowa the commanding advice, “Now, don’t worry!” “Good-bye, Jim!  Good-bye, Maggie!” cried a rotund, snappy American drummer, and was answered with cheery, honest wishes for “the success of his business.”  Two young Americans with the same identical oddity of gait walked to and fro, and a little black Frenchman, with a frightful star-shaped scar at the corner of his mouth, paraded lonelily.  A middle-aged French woman, rouged and dyed back to the thirties, and standing in a nimbus of perfume, wept at the going of a younger woman, and ruined an elaborate make-up with grotesque traceries of tears.  “Give him my love,” she sobbed; “tell him that the business is doing splendidly and that he is not to buy any of Lafitte’s laces next time he goes to Paris en permission.”  A little later, the Rochambeau, with slow majesty, backed into the channel, and turned her bow to the east.

The chief interest of the great majority of her passengers was commercial; there were American drummers keen to line their pockets with European profits; there were French commis voyageurs who had been selling articles of French manufacture which had formerly been made by the Germans; there were half-official persons who had been on missions to American ammunition works; and there was a diplomat or two.  From the sample trunks on board you could have taken anything from a pair of boots to a time fuse.  Altogether, an interesting lot.  Palandeau, a middle-aged Frenchman with a domed, bald forehead like Socrates or Verlaine, had been in America selling eau-de-cologne.

“Then you are getting out something new?” I asked.

“Yes, and no,” he answered.  “Our product is the old-fashioned eau-de-cologne water with the name ‘Farina’ on it.”

“But in America we associate eau-de-cologne with the Germans,” said I.  “Doesn’t the bottle say ‘Johann Maria Farina’?  Surely the form of the name is German.”

“But that was not his name, monsieur; he was a Frenchman, and called himself ‘Jean Marie.’  Yes, really, the Germans stole the manufacture from the French.  Consider the name of the article, ‘eau-de-cologne,’ is not that French?”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“Alors,” said Palandeau; “the blocus has simply given us the power to reclaim trade opportunities justly ours.  Therefore we have printed a new label telling the truth about Farina, and the Boche ‘Johann Maria’ is ‘kapout.’”

“Do you sell much of it?”

“Quantities!  Our product is superior to the Boche article, and has the glamour of an importation.  I await the contest without uneasiness.”