We crossed the river, the unwinking towers of Notre Dame towering pallidly against the dark sky behind us; rattled into the new light of the resuming boulevard; turned up a dark street, and came to a halt before a half-familiar shut door.  You know how one wakes the sleepy concierge, how one takes one’s candle, climbs up hundreds and hundreds of smooth stairs, following the slipshod footfalls of a half-awakened guide upward through Rembrandt’s own shadows, and how one’s final sleep is sweetened by the little inconveniences of a strange bare room and of a strange hard bed.

CHAPTER TEN

Before noon of the next day I was ascending the stairs of the new house in which the Duc had his hermitage.  There was an air of secrecy in the broad publicity of the carpeted stairs that led to his flat; a hush in the atmosphere; in the street itself, a glorified cul de sac that ran into the bustling life of the Italiens.  It had the sudden sluggishness of a back-water.  One seemed to have grown suddenly deaf in the midst of the rattle.

There was an incredible suggestion of silence—­the silence of a private detective—­in the mien of the servant who ushered me into a room.  He was the English servant of the theatre—­the English servant that foreigners affect.  The room had a splendour of its own, not a cheaply vulgar splendour, but the vulgarity of the most lavish plush and purple kind.  The air was heavy, killed by the scent of exotic flowers, darkened by curtains that suggested the voluminous velvet backgrounds of certain old portraits.  The Duc de Mersch had carried with him into this place of retirement the taste of the New Palace, that show-place of his that was the stupefaction of swarms of honest tourists.

I remembered soon enough that the man was a philanthropist, that he might be an excellent man of heart and indifferent of taste.  He must be.  But I was prone to be influenced by things of this sort, and felt depressed at the thought that so much of royal excellence should weigh so heavily in the wrong scale of the balance of the applied arts.  I turned my back on the room and gazed at the blazing white decorations of the opposite house-fronts.

A door behind me must have opened, for I heard the sounds of a concluding tirade in a high-pitched voice.

“Et quant a un duc de farce, je ne m’en fiche pas mal, moi,” it said in an accent curiously compounded of the foreign and the coulisse.  A muttered male remonstrance ensued, and then, with disconcerting clearness: 

“Gr-r-rangeur—­Eschingan—­eh bien—­il entend.  Et moi, j’entends, moi aussi.  Tu veux me jouer centre elle.  La Grangeur—­pah!  Consoles-toi avec elle, mon vieux.  Je ne veux plus de toi.  Tu m’as donne de tes sales rentes Groenlandoises, et je n’ai pas pu les vendre.  Ah, vieux farceur, tu vas voir ce que fen vais faire.”

A glorious creature—­a really glorious creature—­came out of an adjoining room.  She was as frail, as swaying as a garden lily.  Her great blue eyes turned irefully upon me, her bowed lips parted, her nostrils quivered.