“We turn rather sadly away from Pré Catalan and the Café Cascade. We glide adown the flower-bordered path and out from the clusters of Chinese lanterns, and leave the twinkling groves to their music and merry-making. Yonder behind us, like a sentinel, rises Mont Valerien. Before us glimmer the lamps of uncountable coaches, as our own, veering toward the city, the moon just topping the tower of St. Jacques de la Boucherie and silver-plating the bronze figures upon the Arch of Stars. “We enter the Port Maillot. We turn into the Avenue du Bois. Presently we shall sweep with the rest through the Champs Èlysées and on to the ocean of the infinite, the heart of the mystery we call Life, nowhere so condensed, so palpable, so appealing. Roll the screen away! The shades of Clovis and Genevieve may be seen hand-in-hand with the shades of Martel and Pepin, taking the round of the ghost-walk between St. Denis and St. Germain, now le Balafré and again Navarre, now the assassins of the Ligue and now the assassins of the Terror, to keep them company. Nor yet quite all on murder bent, some on pleasure; the Knights and Ladies of the Cloth of Gold and the hosts of the Renaissance: Cyrano de Bergerac and François Villon leading the ragamuffin procession; the jades of the Fronde, Longueville, Chevreuse and fair-haired Anne of Austria; and Ninon, too, and Manon; and the never-to-be-forgotten Four, ‘one for all and all for one;’ Cagliostro and Monte Cristo; on the side, Rabelais taking notes and laughing under his cowl. Catherine de Medici and Robespierre slinking away, poor, guilty things, into the pale twilight of the Dawn! “Names! Names! Only names? I am not just so sure about that. In any event, what a roll call! We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded by a sleep; the selfsame sleep which these, our living dead men and women in steel armor and gauzy muslins, in silken hose and sock and buskin, epaulettes and top boots, brocades and buff facings, have endured so long and know so well! “If I should die in Paris I should expect them—or some of them—to meet me at the barriers and to say, ‘Behold, the wickedness that was done in the world, the cruelty and the wrong, dwelt in the body, not in the soul of man, which freed from its foul incasement, purified and made eternal by the hand of death, shall see both the glory and the hand of God!’” It was not to be. I shall not die in Paris. I shall never come again. Neither shall I make apology for this long quotation by myself from myself, for am I not inditing an autobiography, so called? Chapter the Sixteenth Monte Carlo—The European Shrine of Sport and Fashion—Apocryphal Gambling Stories—Leopold, King of the Belgians—An Able and Picturesque Man of Business I