“Your Excellency!” began the Chamberlain, in the most obsequious manner.

“I am not an Excellency!” replied Vivier.

“General, then—­Monsieur le General?”

“I am not a General!”

“Colonel, perhaps, and aide-de-camp to his Imperial Majesty?”

“I am not in the army.  I have no official rank—­no rank of any kind whatever.”

“Good heavens! then what are you?” exclaimed the Chamberlain, indignant with himself for having treated as high-born and high-placed one who was apparently a mere nobody.

“I am a musician,” said Vivier.

Bounding with rage, the Court functionary made an unbecoming gesture, such as Mephistopheles, according to the stage directions, should make in one of the passages of Goethe’s Faust.

“Very well, my friend,” said Vivier to himself, “I will tell the Emperor of your rude behaviour; I will get you rapped on the knuckles” ("Je t’en ferai donner sur les doigts"); and the uncourtly courtier was, in fact, severely reprimanded.

At St. Petersburg Vivier took such liberties with the Emperor Nicholas that, if half the stories of that monarch were true, the imprudent Frenchman would have been arrested, knouted, and sent to Siberia.

He had just brought to perfection the art of blowing soap bubbles.  The whole secret of his process consisted, as he once informed me, in mixing with the soap-suds a little gum.  Using a solution of soap and gum, he was able to produce bubbles of such size and solidity that they floated in the air for an almost indefinite time, like so many small balloons.  In order to entertain the St. Petersburg public, Vivier would, in the most benevolent manner, take his seat at an open window, and blow his gigantic and many-coloured bubbles, until these prodigies of aerostation had attracted a multitude of lookers-on.  The delighted crowd applauded with enthusiasm.  Vivier rose from his seat and bowed.  Then the applause was renewed, and Vivier blew larger and brighter bubbles than before.

One evening, or rather afternoon, the rays of the setting sun were illuminating a number of iridescent balloons floating high above the point where the Nevsky Prospect runs into the Admiralty Square, when the Emperor Nicholas drove past, or tried to do so—­for his progress was interrupted at every step by the density of the crowd.

“What is the meaning of all this?” asked the Emperor Nicholas.

“It is M. Vivier blowing his soap bubbles,” replied the aide-de-camp in attendance.

“What!  Vivier, the French musician, who played the horn so wonderfully the other night at the Winter Palace, and afterwards entertained us so much with his conversation?”

“The same, sire.”

“Go to him, then, and tell him that I should be glad if he would choose some other time for his soap-bubble performances.  How wonderful they are!”

The aide-de-camp forced his way through the crowd, went upstairs to Vivier’s apartments, and told him that the Emperor desired him not to give his exhibition of soap bubbles at half-past three in the afternoon, that being the time when his Majesty usually went for a drive.