Vivier took out a pocket-book, consulted it carefully, and, turning to the aide-de-camp, said with the utmost gravity, “That is the only hour I have disengaged.”

Vivier, meanwhile, had had his joke; and his exhibition of soap bubbles, or rather of gum-and-soap balloons, was now discontinued.

The horn-playing performance to which the Emperor Nicholas had made reference was marked by one strange, marvellous, almost inexplicable peculiarity.  The player sounded on his instrument, simultaneously, a chord of four notes.  To produce at the same time four different notes from one and the same tube seems, and must be, an impossibility.  But Vivier did it, and the fact was certified to by Meyerbeer, Auber, Halevy, Adolphe Adam, and other musicians of eminence.

The only possible explanation of the matter is that Vivier executed a very rapid arpeggio, so that the four notes which apparently were heard together were, in fact, heard one after the other.  The effect, however, was not that of an arpeggio, but of a chord of four different notes played simultaneously on four different instruments.

Both for home and for out-of-doors use the mystifications practised by Vivier were as numerous as they were varied.  In an omnibus, when some grave old lady had just risen from her seat, Vivier would assume an expression of the utmost astonishment, and suddenly take from the place where she had been sitting an egg, which meanwhile he had been concealing up his sleeve.

Or, asked to pass a coin to the conductor, he would gravely put it into his pocket.  A well-dressed, well-bred gentleman, of charming manners, could scarcely be suspected of any intention to misappropriate a two-sous piece.  But it interested Vivier to see what, in the circumstances, the lawful owner of the coin would do.  On one occasion Vivier, in an omnibus, alarmed his fellow passengers by pretending to be mad.  He indulged in the wildest gesticulations, and then, as if in despair, drew a pistol from his pocket.  The conductor was called upon by acclamation to interfere, and Vivier was on the point of being disarmed when suddenly he broke the pistol in two, handed half to the conductor and began to eat the other half himself.  It was made of chocolate!

Vivier could not bear to see people in a hurry.  According to him, there was nothing in life worth hurrying for; and living on the Boulevard just opposite the Rue Vivienne, he was much annoyed at seeing so many persons hastening, towards six o’clock, to the post office on the Place de la Bourse.  He determined to pay them out, and for that purpose bought a calf, which he took up to his apartments at night and exhibited the next afternoon at a few minutes before six o’clock, in the balcony of his second floor.  In spite of their eagerness to catch the post, many persons could not help stopping to look at the calf.  Soon a crowd collected, and messengers stayed their steps in order to gaze at the unwonted apparition.  Six o’clock struck, and soon after a number of men who had missed the post returned in an irritated condition, and, stopping before Vivier’s house, shook their fists at him.  Vivier went down to them, and asked the meaning of this insolence.