allowed to come to town in the holidays as a reward for having passed his examination well.  And she was such an interesting, entertaining guide!  She was thoroughly acquainted with the history or the anecdotes connected with the various streets and buildings, and on their way from the Column of July to the Opera House, from the Madeleine to the Arc de Triomphe, from the Odeon to the Pantheon, she unrolled a sparkling picture of Paris, past and present, now showing him the seething crowds of the lower classes and their customs and doings in good and bad hours, now describing well-known contemporaries with all that was absurd or commendable in them.  Stories, scandals, traits of character, encounters she had had, adventures that had befallen her, all flowed from her lips in a gay, babbling, inexhaustible stream, and initiated her hearer into all the intricacies of Parisian life.  She was as familiar with the galleries as with the famous buildings, and in front of the works of art in the one and the facades of the other she fired off a rocket-like shower of original remarks, paradoxes, and brilliant criticism.  She knew exactly where to scoff and where to be enthusiastic, jeered with all the ruthless slang of the Paris gamins at the pompously mediocre sights recommended to the tourists’ admiration by Baedeker, and gave evidence of deep and true comprehension of all that was really beautiful.

At the very beginning she dragged Wilhelm to a photographer’s studio and disclosed to him, when it was too late to beat a retreat, that he was to be photographed.  What for?  A fancy of hers—­she wanted to have his likeness.  Half-length, full-length, full-face, profile.  Only when the pictures were sent home did he discover, that she did not want them for herself, but to send to her mother.  It was high time she should see what the man was like who alone made life worth living for her only child.  That she should draw her mother into an affair of the kind of which women do not, as a rule, boast to their families, seemed to him peculiarly bad taste.  “What,” he cried, “you have told your mother the whole story?”

“My mother is a Spaniard, she will guess what one leaves unsaid.”

“And you are not ashamed that she should know?”

“That is why I am sending her your likeness; she will then understand that, on the contrary, I have every reason to be proud.”

What she did not consider it necessary to explain to him was, that she had palmed off a complete romance upon the Marquise de Henares, to the effect that Wilhelm had saved her life at Ault while bathing, that he was a celebrated German revolutionist, and the future President of the German Republic, to whom she was affording a refuge in her house because, for the time being, he was obliged to be in hiding from the German secret police, and so forth, and so forth.