The carriage stopped, and the speckless footman, jumping down, inquired: "Monsieur Heine?" The _concierge_, knitting beside the _porte cochère_, looked at him, looked at the glittering victoria he represented, and at the _grande dame_ who sat in it, shielding herself with a parasol from the glory of the Parisian sunlight. Then she shook her head. "But this is number three, Avenue Matignon?" "Yes, but Monsieur receives only his old friends. He is dying." "Madame knows. Take up her name.'" The _concierge_ glanced at the elegant card. She saw "Lady"--which she imagined meant an English _Duchesse_--and words scribbled on it in pencil. "It is _au cinquième_," she said, with a sigh. "I will take it up." Ere he returned, Madame descended and passed from the sparkling sunshine into the gloom of the portico, with a melancholy consciousness of the symbolic. For her spirit, too, had its poetic intuitions and insights, and had been trained by friendship with one of the wittiest and tenderest women of her time to some more than common apprehension of the greater spirit at whose living tomb she was come to worship. Hers was a fine face, wearing the triple aristocracy of beauty, birth, and letters. The complexion was of lustreless ivory, the black hair wound round and round. The stateliness of her figure completed the impression of a Roman matron. "Monsieur Heine begs that your ladyship will do him the honor of mounting, and will forgive him the five stories for the sake of the view." Her ladyship's sadness was tinctured by a faint smile at the message, which the footman delivered without any suspicion that the view in question meant the view of Heine himself. But then that admirable menial had not the advantage of her comprehensive familiarity with Heine's writings. She crossed the blank stony courtyard and curled up the curving five flights, her mind astir with pictures and emotions. She had scribbled on her card a reminder of her identity; but could he remember, after all those years, and in his grievous sickness, the little girl of eleven who had sat next to him at the Boulogne _table d'hôte_? And she herself could now scarcely realize at times that the stout, good-natured, short-sighted little man with the big white brow, who had lounged with her daily at the end of the pier, telling her stories, was the most mordant wit in Europe, "the German Aristophanes"; and that those nursery tales, grotesquely compact of mermaids, water-sprites, and a funny old French fiddler with a poodle that diligently took three baths a day, were the frolicsome improvisations of perhaps the greatest lyric poet of his age. She recalled their parting: "When you go back to England, you can tell your friends that you have seen Heinrich Heine!" To which the little girl: "And who is Heinrich Heine?" A query which had set the blue-eyed little man roaring with laughter.