Before this grand pilgrimage to the temples of vice and excitement, however, Barfleur and I spent a remarkable evening wandering from one restaurant to another in an effort to locate a certain Mlle. Rillette, a girl who, he had informed me when we first came to Paris, had been one of the most interesting figures of the Folies stage. Four or five years before she had held at the Folies-Bergère much the same position now recently attained by Mistinguett who was just then enthralling Paris--in other words, she was the sensation of that stormy world of art and romance of which these restaurants are a part. She was more than that. She had a wonderful mezzo-soprano voice of great color and richness and a spirit for dancing that was Greek in its quality. Barfleur was most anxious that I should get at least a glimpse of this exceptional Parisian type--the real spirit of this fast world, your true artistic poison flower, your lovely hooded cobra--before she should be too old, or too wretched, to be interesting. We started out to visit G.’s Bar, the Bar Fysher, the Rat Mort, Palmyr’s Bar, the Grelot, the Rabelais, in fact the whole list of restaurants and show-places where on occasion she might be expected to be seen. On the way Barfleur recounted bits of her interesting history, her marriages, divorces, vices, drug-habits, a strange category of tendencies that sometimes affect the most vigorous and eager of human temperaments. At one café, on this expedition, quite by accident apparently, we encountered Miss X., whom I had not seen since we left Fishguard, and who was here in Paris doing her best to outvie the women of the gay restaurants in the matter of her dresses, her hats, and her beauty. I must say she presented a ravishing spectacle--quite as wonderful as any of the other women who were to be seen here; but she lacked, as I was to note, the natural vivacity of the French. We Americans, in spite of our high spirits and our healthy enthusiasm for life, are nevertheless a blend of the English, the German, and some of the sedate nations of the north; and we are inclined to a physical and mental passivity which is not common to the Latins. This Miss X., vivid creature that she was, did not have the spiritual vibration which accompanies the French women. So far as spirit was concerned, she seemed superior to most of the foreign types present--but the French women are naturally gayer, their eyes brighter, their motions lighter. She gave us at once an account of her adventures since I had seen her--where she had been living, what places she had visited, and what a good time she was having. I could not help marveling at the disposition which set above everything else in the world the privilege of moving in this peculiar realm which fascinated her so much. From a conventional point of view, much of what she did was, to say the least of it, unusual, but she did not trouble about this. As she told me on the _Mauretania_, all