“Nebuchadnezzar, my dear Arbuthnot, is a worthy Shylock of my acquaintance—­a gentleman well known to Bohemia—­one who buys and sells whatever is purchasable and saleable on the face of the globe, from a ship of war to a comic paragraph in the Charivari.  He deals in bric-a-brac, sermons, government sinecures, pugs, false hair, light literature, patent medicines, and the fine arts.  He lives in the Place des Victoires.  Would you like to be introduced to him?”

“Immensely.”

“Well, then, be here by eight to-morrow morning, and I’ll take you with me.  After nine he goes out, or is only visible to buyers.  Here’s my bottle of Rhenish—­genuine Assmanshauser.  Are you hungry?”

I admitted that I was not unconscious of a sensation akin to appetite.

He gazed steadfastly into the cupboard, and shook his head.

“A box of sardines,” he said, gloomily, “nearly empty.  Half a loaf, evidently disinterred from Pompeii.  An inch of Lyons sausage, saved from the ark; the remains of a bottle of fish sauce, and a pot of currant jelly.  What will you have?”

I decided for the relics of Pompeii and the deluge, and we sat down to discuss those curious delicacies.  Having no corkscrew, we knocked off the neck of the bottle, and being short of glasses, drank our wine out of teacups.

“But you have never opened your parcel all this time,” I said presently.  “It may be full of billets de banque—­who can tell?”

“That’s true,” said Mueller; and broke the seals.

“By all the Gods of Olympus!” he shouted, holding up a small oblong volume bound in dark green cloth.  “My sketch-book!”

He opened it, and a slip of paper fell out.  On this slip of paper were written, in a very neat, small hand, the words, “Returned with thanks;” but the page that contained the sketch made in the Cafe Procope was missing.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XXXIII.

AN EVENING PARTY AMONG THE PETIT-BOURGEOISIE.

Madame Marotte, as I have already mentioned more than once, lived in the Rue du Faubourg St. Denis; which, as all the world knows, is a prolongation of the Rue St. Denis—­just as the Rue St. Denis was, in my time, a transpontine continuation of the old Rue de la Harpe.  Beginning at the Place du Chatelet as the Rue St. Denis, opening at its farther end on the Boulevart St. Denis and passing under the triumphal arch of Louis le Grand (called the Porte St. Denis), it there becomes first the Rue du Faubourg St. Denis, and then the interminable Grande Route du St. Denis which drags its slow length along all the way to the famous Abbey outside Paris.