I had often wondered as I strolled about the place in the daytime or peered through the iron fence at dusk, if strange things did not go on here at night, with this crowd of effigies of persons historical and more or less mythological, in this garden peopled with the representatives of the dead, and no doubt by the shades of kings and queens and courtiers, ‘intrigantes’ and panders, priests and soldiers, who live once in this old pile—­real shades, which are always invisible in the sunlight.  They have local attachments, I suppose.  Can science tell when they depart forever from the scenes of their objective intrusion into the affairs of this world, or how long they are permitted to revisit them?  Is it true that in certain spiritual states, say of isolation or intense nervous alertness, we can see them as they can see each other?  There was I—­the I catalogued in the police description—­present in that garden, yet so earnestly longing to be somewhere else that would it be wonderful if my ‘eidolon’ was somewhere else and could be seen?—­though not by a policeman, for policemen have no spiritual vision.

There were no policemen in the garden, that I was certain of; but a little after half-past one I saw a Man, not a man I had ever seen before, clad in doublet and hose, with a short cloak and a felt cap with a white plume, come out of the Pavillon de Flore and turn down the quay towards the house I had seen that afternoon where it stood—­of the beautiful Gabrielle d’Estrees.  I might have been mistaken but for the fact that, just at this moment, a window opened in the wing of the same pavilion, and an effeminate, boyish face, weak and cruel, with a crown on its head, appeared and looked down into the shadow of the building as if its owner saw what I had seen.  And there was nothing remarkable in this, except that nowadays kings do not wear crowns at night.  It occurred to me that there was a masquerade going on in the Tuileries, though I heard no music, except the tinkle of, it might be, a harp, or “the lascivious pleasing of a lute,” and I walked along down towards the central pavilion.  I was just in time to see two ladies emerge from it and disappear, whispering together, in the shrubbery; the one old, tall, and dark, with the Italian complexion, in a black robe, and the other young, petite, extraordinarily handsome, and clad in light and bridal stuffs, yet both with the same wily look that set me thinking on poisons, and with a grace and a subtle carriage of deceit that could be common only to mother and daughter.  I didn’t choose to walk any farther in the part of the garden they had chosen for a night promenade, and turned off abruptly.

What?