“By the way, I suppose you aren’t any relation of Octave Boissy?”

I rather hoped he was; for after all, say what you like, there is a certain pleasure in feeling that you have been to school with even a relative of so tremendous a European celebrity as Octave Boissy—­the man who made a million and a half francs with his second play, which was nevertheless quite a good play.  All the walls of Paris were shouting his name.

“I’m the johnny himself,” he replied with timidity, naively proud of his Saxon slang.

I did not give an astounded No!  An astounded No! would have been rude.  Still, my fear is that I failed to conceal entirely my amazement.  I had to fight desperately against the natural human tendency to assume that no boy with whom one has been to school can have developed into a great man.

“Really!” I remarked, as calmly as I could, and added a shocking lie:  “Well, I’m not surprised!” And at the same time I could hear myself saying a few days later at the office of my paper:  “I met Octave Boissy in Paris.  Went to school with him, you know.”

“You’d forgotten my Christian name, probably,” he said.

“No, I hadn’t,” I answered.  “Your Christian name was Minor.  You never had any other!” He smiled kindly.  “But what on earth are you doing here?”

Octave Boissy was a very wealthy man.  He even looked a very wealthy man.  He was one of the darlings of success and of an absurdly luxurious civilization.  And he seemed singularly out of place in the vast, banal foyer of the Hotel Terminus, among the shifting, bustling crowd of utterly ordinary, bourgeois, moderately well-off tourists and travellers and needy touts.  He ought at least to have been in a very select private room at the Meurice or the Bristol, if in any hotel at all!

“The fact is, I’m neurasthenic,” he said simply, just as if he had been saying, “The fact is, I’ve got a wooden leg.”

“Oh!” I laughed, determined to treat him as Boissy Minor, and not as Octave Boissy.

“I have a morbid horror of walking in the open air.  And yet I cannot bear being in a small enclosed space, especially when it’s moving.  This is extremely inconvenient. Mais que veux-tu?...  Suis comme ca!”

“Je te plains” I put in, so as to return his familiar and flattering “thou” immediately.

“I was strongly advised to go and stay in the country,” he went on, with the same serious, wistful simplicity, “and so I ordered a special saloon carriage on the railway, so as to have as much breathing room as possible; and I ventured from my house to this station in an auto.  I thought I could surely manage that.  But I couldn’t!  I had a terrible crisis on arriving at the station, and I had to sit on a luggage-truck for four hours.  I couldn’t have persuaded myself to get into the saloon carriage for a fortune!  I couldn’t go back home in the auto!  I couldn’t walk!  So I stepped into the hotel.  I’ve been here ever since.”