“Your boat?”

“I am going to Algiers.”

“Where will you be staying, Monsieur?  I ask in no spirit of vulgar curiosity.”

I raised a protesting hand, and with a smile named my hotel.

“I arrived here from Algiers yesterday afternoon,” he said, “and I proceed there again to-morrow.”

“I regret,” said I, “that you are not coming to-day, so that I could have the pleasure of your company on the voyage.”

My polite formula seemed to delight Professor Anastasius Papadopoulos enormously.  He made a series of the most complicated bows, to the joy of the waiters and the passers-by.  I shook hands with him and with the stolid Monsieur Saupiquet, and waving my hat more like an excited Montenegrin than the most respectable of British valetudinarians, I drove off to the Quai de la Joliette, where I found an anxious but dogged Rogers, in the midst of a vociferating crowd, literally holding the bridge that gave access to the Marechal Bugeaud.

“Thank Heaven, you’ve come, sir!  You almost missed it.  I couldn’t have held out another minute.”

I, too, was thankful.  If I had missed the boat I should have had to wait till the next day and crossed in the embarrassing and unrestful company of Professor Anastasius Papadopoulos.  It is not that I dislike the little man, or have the Briton’s nervous shrinking from being seen in eccentric society; but I wish to eliminate mediaevalism as far as possible from my quest.  In conjunction with this crazy-headed little trainer of cats it would become too preposterous even for my light sardonic humour.  I resolved to dismiss him from my mind altogether.

Yet, in spite of my determination, and in spite of one of Monsieur Lenotre’s fascinating monographs on the French Revolution, on which I had counted to beguile the tedium of the journey, I could not get Anastasius Papadopoulos out of my head.  He stayed with me the whole of a storm-tossed night, and all the next morning.  He has haunted my brain ever since.  I see him tossing his arms about in fury, while the broken-nosed Saupiquet makes his monotonous claim for the payment of sevenpence halfpenny; I hear him speak in broken whispers of the disastrous quadruped on whose skin and hoofs Saupiquet got drunk.  I see him strutting about and boasting of his intellect.  I see him taking leave of Lola Brandt, and trotting magnificently out of the room bent on finding Captain Vauvenarde.  He haunts my slumbers.  I hope to goodness he will not take to haunting this delectable hotel.

I wonder, after all, whether there is any method in his madness—­for mad he is, as mad as can be.  Why does he come backwards and forwards between Algiers and Marseilles?  What has Saupiquet to do with his quest?  What revelation was he about to make on the payment of his fifteen sous?  It is all so grotesque, so out of relation with ordinary life.  I feel inclined to go up to the retired Colonels and elderly maiden ladies, who seem to form the majority of my fellow-guests, and pinch them and ask them whether they are real, or, like Papadopoulos and Saupiquet, the gentler creatures of a nightmare.