We went in.  Mueller paused, looked round, captured a passing waiter, and asked for Monsieur le proprietaire.  The waiter pointed over his shoulder towards the house, and breathlessly rushed on his way.

Mueller at once led the way into a salon on the ground-floor looking over the garden.

Here we found ourselves in a large low room containing some thirty or forty tables, and fitted up after the universal restaurant pattern, with cheap-looking glasses, rows of hooks, and spittoons in due number.  The air was heavy with the combined smells of many dinners, and noisy with the clatter of many tongues.  Behind the fruits, cigars, and liqueur bottles that decorated the comptoir sat a plump, black-eyed little woman in a gorgeous cap and a red silk dress.  This lady welcomed us with a bewitching smile and a gracious inclination of the head.

“Ces messieurs,” she said, “will find a vacant table yonder, by the window.”

Mueller bowed majestically.

“Madame,” he said, “I wish to see Monsieur le proprietaire.”

The dame de comptoir looked very uneasy.

“If Monsieur has any complaint to make,” she said, “he can make it to me.”

“Madame, I have none.”

“Or if it has reference to the ordering of a dinner....”

Mueller smiled loftily.

“Dinner, Madame,” he said, with a disdainful gesture, “is but one of the accidents common to humanity.  A trifle!  A trifle always humiliating—­sometimes inconvenient—­occasionally impossible.  No, Madame, mine is a serious mission; a mission of the highest importance, both socially and commercially.  May I beg that you will have the goodness to place my card in the hands of Monsieur le proprietaire, and say that I request the honor of five minutes’ interview.”

The little woman’s eyes had all this time been getting rounder and blacker.  She was evidently confounded by my friend’s grandiloquence.

“Ah! mon Dieu!  M’sieur,” she said, nervously, “my husband is in the kitchen.  It is a busy day with us, you understand—­but I will send for him.”

And she forthwith despatched a waiter for “Monsieur Choucru.”

Mueller seized me by the arm.

“Heavens!” he exclaimed, in a very audible aside, “did you hear?  She is his wife!  She is Madame Choucru?”

“Well, and what of that?”

“What of that, indeed? Mais, mon ami, how can you ask the question?  Have you no eyes?  Look at her!  Such a remarkably handsome woman—­such a tournure—­such eyes—­such a figure for an illustration!  Only conceive the effect of Madame Choucru—­in medallion!”

“Oh, magnificent!” I replied.  “Magnificent—­in medallion.”

But I could not, for the life of me, imagine what he was driving at.

“And it would make the fortune of the Toison d’Or” he added, solemnly.

To which I replied that it would undoubtedly do so.