Our manager left Berlin with his company, leaving me with only just enough money to pay my bills at the hotel when I had completed the contract that held me to the music hall in Berlin. I then had absolutely no engagement in sight. I learned that he was getting ten thousand marks--about $2,500--a month for me. And yet he had given me only about $300 a month. What was I to do? My appearance in Berlin had been deplorable and was likely to have an unfortunate influence on my whole career in Europe. My purse was empty, my mother ill. We had not the slightest hope of an engagement and we had no one to help us. A theatrical agent, an unknown man at that time, who has since become a theatrical manager, Mr. Marten Stein, came to see me, and I tried to continue at the music hall where I was dancing. I was obliged to make concessions to keep going a week or two more, to get money enough to go away and to look for a new engagement. I kept thinking more than ever of Paris. If I could only go there! In these circumstances Mr. Marten Stein secured for me a dozen performances in one of the beer gardens at Altona, the well-known pleasure resort near Hamburg. I earned there several hundred marks, which allowed us to go to Cologne, where I had to dance in a circus between an educated donkey and an elephant that played the organ. My humiliation was complete. Since then, however, occasions have not been lacking when I have realised that the proximity of trained horses and music-mad elephants is less humiliating than intercourse with some human beings. Finally I left for Paris. To economise as closely as possible we had to travel third class. But what did that matter? That was only a detail. I was going to Paris to succeed there or to sink into obscurity. V MY APPEARANCE AT THE FOLIES-BERGÈRE Paris! Paris! At last Paris! It seemed to me that I was saved and that all my troubles were coming to an end. Paris was the port after storm, the harbour of refuge after the furious rage of life’s tempest. And I thought in my simplicity that I was going to conquer this great Paris that I had so long coveted. In America I had often danced on important stages during the intervals between operatic acts, and I fancied that it would be the same in Paris. Accordingly upon my arrival, which occurred in October, 1892, even before going to my room at the Grand Hotel, I instructed my agent, Mr. Marten Stein, to call upon M. Gailhard, manager of the National Academy of Music and Dancing, to whom I had written from Germany to propose my dancing at his theatre. National Academy of Dancing! I still believed, in my simple soul, in names. I fancied that an institution of this sort ought to be receptive of innovations in dancing.