“Le voila! the drama of Madame la Baronne!  The play opens when she is first a novice in the convent of Saint Ursula, devoted to good works and the church.  Next you find her a grand dame and rich, the wife of Baron Alphonse de Frontignac, first secretary of legation at Vienna.  Then a mother with one child,—­a boy, now six or seven years old, who is hardly ever out of her arms.”  He stopped, toyed for a moment with his match-safe, slipped it into his pocket, and said carelessly, “So much for Act I.”

Then, after a pause during which he traced again little diagrams in the gravel, he said suddenly:—­

“Does this really interest you, monsieur?”

“Unquestionably.”

“You know her, then?” This with a glance of suspicion as keen as it was unexpected by me.

“Never saw her in my life before,” I answered frankly, “and never shall again.  I leave for Paris to-day, and sail from Havre on Saturday.”

He drew in the point of his cane, looked me all over with one of those comprehensive sweeps of the eye, as if he would read my inmost thought, and then, with an expression of confidence born doubtless of my evident sincerity, continued:—­

“In the next act Frontignac gets mixed up in some banking scandals,—­he would, like a fool, play roulette—­baccarat was always his strong game,—­disappears from Vienna, is arrested at the frontier, escapes, and is found the next morning under a brush-heap with a bullet through his head.  This ends the search.  Two years later—­this is now Act III.—­Madame la Baronne, without a sou to her name, is hard at work in the hospitals of Metz.  The child is pensioned out near by.

“Now comes the grand romance.  An officer attached to the 13th Cuirassiers—­a regiment with not men enough left after Metz to muster a company—­is picked up for dead, with one arm torn off, and a sabre-slash over his head, and brought to her ward.  She nurses him back to life, inch by inch, and in six months he joins his regiment.  Now please follow the plot.  It is quite interesting.  Is it not easy to see what will happen?  Tender and beautiful, young and brave!  Vive le bel amour!  It is the old story, but it is also une affaire de coeur—­la grande passion.  In a few months they are married, and he takes her to his home in Rouen.  There he listens to her entreaties, and resigns his commission.

“This was five years ago.  To-day he is a broken-down man, starving on his pension; a poor devil about the streets, instead of a general commanding a department; and all for love of her.  Some, of course, said it was the sabre-cut; some that he could no longer hold his command, he was so badly slashed.  But it is as I tell you.  You can see him here any day, sitting under the trees, playing with the child, or along the lake front, leaning on her arm.”

Here the croupier rose from the bench, looked critically over his case of cigarettes, selected one carefully, and began buttoning his coat as if to go.