The little tour was most successful, and I never enjoyed myself more than in this artistic promenade. Duquesnel organized excursions and fêtes outside the towns. At first he had prepared, thinking to please me, some visits to the sights of the towns. He had written beforehand from Paris fixing dates and hours. The guardians of the different museums, art galleries, etc., had offered to point out to me the finest objects in their collections and the mayors had prepared the visits to the churches and celebrated buildings. When, on the eve of our departure, he showed us the heap of letters, each giving a most amiable affirmative, I shrieked. I hate seeing public buildings, and having them explained to me. I know most of the public sights of France, but I have visited them when I felt inclined and with my own chosen friends. As to the churches and other buildings, I find them very tiresome. I cannot help it—it really wearies me to see them. I can admire their outline in passing, or when I see them silhouetted against the setting sun, that is all right, but further than that I will not go. The idea of entering these cold spaces, while some one explains their absurd and interminable history, of looking up at their ceilings with craning neck, of cramping my feet by walking unnaturally over highly waxed floors, of being obliged to admire the restoration of the left wing, (that they would have done better by letting crumble to ruins,) to have to wonder at the depth of some moat which once used to be full of water but is now dry as the east wind ... all that is so tiresome it makes me want to howl. From my earliest childhood I have always detested houses, castles, churches, towers, and all buildings higher than a mill. I love low buildings, farms, huts, and I positively adore mills, because these little buildings do not obstruct the horizon. I have nothing to say against the Pyramids, but I would a hundred times rather they had never been built. I begged Duquesnel to send telegrams at once to all the notabilities who had been so obliging. We passed two hours over this task and the 3rd of September I set out, free, joyful, and content. My friends came to see me while I was on tour, in accordance with the lots they had drawn, and we had picnics by coach into the surrounding country in all the towns in which I played. I came back to Paris on the 30th of September, and had only just time to prepare for my journey to America. I had been only a week at Paris when I had a visit from M. Bertrand, who was then director of the Variétés. His brother was director of the Vaudeville in partnership with Raymond Deslandes. I did not know Eugène Bertrand, but I received him at once, for we had mutual friends. “What are you going to do when you come back from America?” he asked me, after we had exchanged greetings. “I really don’t know.... Nothing. I have not thought of anything.”