“Oh, what a setting for a love scene!” I exclaimed.

She smiled.

“Is it not true?  Is it not true?  You will see!”

And she made me sit down beside her.

“This is what makes one long for more life.  But you hardly think of these things, you men of to-day.  You are speculators, merchants and men of affairs.

“You no longer even know how to talk to us.  When I say ‘you,’ I mean young men in general.  Love has been turned into a liaison which very often begins with an unpaid dressmaker’s bill.  If you think the bill is dearer than the woman, you disappear; but if you hold the woman more highly, you pay it.  Nice morals—­and a nice kind of love!”

She took my hand.

“Look!”

I looked, astonished and delighted.  Down there at the end of the avenue, in the moonlight, were two young people, with their arms around each other’s waist.  They were walking along, interlaced, charming, with short, little steps, crossing the flakes of light; which illuminated them momentarily, and then sinking back into the shadow.  The youth was dressed in a suit of white satin, such as men wore in the eighteenth century, and had on a hat with an ostrich plume.  The girl was arrayed in a gown with panniers, and the high, powdered coiffure of the handsome dames of the time of the Regency.

They stopped a hundred paces from us, and standing in the middle of the avenue, they kissed each other with graceful gestures.

Suddenly I recognized the two little servants.  Then one of those dreadful fits of laughter that convulse you made me writhe in my chair.  But I did not laugh aloud.  I resisted, convulsed and feeling almost ill, as a man whose leg is cut off resists the impulse to cry out.

As the young pair turned toward the farther end of the avenue they again became delightful.  They went farther and farther away, finally disappearing as a dream disappears.  I no longer saw them.  The avenue seemed a sad place.

I took my leave at once, so as not to see them again, for I guessed that this little play would last a long time, awakening, as it did, a whole past of love and of stage scenery; the artificial past, deceitful and seductive, false but charming, which still stirred the heart of this amorous old comedienne.

THE RONDOLI SISTERS

I

I set out to see Italy thoroughly on two occasions, and each time I was stopped at the frontier and could not get any further.  So I do not know Italy, said my friend, Charles Jouvent.  And yet my two attempts gave me a charming idea of the manners of that beautiful country.  Some time, however, I must visit its cities, as well as the museums and works of art with which it abounds.  I will make another attempt to penetrate into the interior, which I have not yet succeeded in doing.