Next day my uncle sent me back in the B---- diligence to my respectable parents, to whom, you may feel assured, I never breathed a word of my adventure. My uncle died; his house and furniture were sold; probably the tapestry was sold with the rest. But a long time afterward, while foraging the shop of a bric-à-brac merchant in search of oddities, I stumbled over a great dusty roll of something covered with cobwebs. "What is that?" I said to the Auvergnat. "That is a rococo tapestry representing the amours of Madame Omphale and Monsieur Hercule. It is genuine Beauvais, worked in silk, and in an excellent state of preservation. Buy this from me for your study. I will not charge you dear for it, since it is you." At the name of Omphale all my blood rushed to my heart. "Unroll that tapestry," I said to the merchant in a hurried, gasping voice, like one in a fever. It was indeed she! I fancied that her mouth smiled graciously at me, and that her eye lighted up on meeting mine. "How much do you ask?" "Well, I could not possibly let you have it for any less than five hundred francs." "I have not that much with me now. I will get it and be back in an hour." I returned with the money, but the tapestry was no longer there. An Englishman had bargained for it during my absence, offered six hundred francs for it, and taken it away with him. After all, perhaps it was best that it should have been thus, and that I should preserve this delicious souvenir intact. They say one should never return to a first love, or look at the rose which one admired the evening before. And then I am no longer so young or so pretty that tapestries should come down from their walls to honor me. KING CANDAULES CHAPTER I Five hundred years before the Trojan war, and seventeen hundred and fifteen years before our own era, there was a grand festival at Sardes. King Candaules was going to marry. The people were affected with that sort of pleasurable interest and aimless emotion wherewith any royal event inspires the masses, even though it in no wise concerns them, and transpires in superior spheres of life which they can never hope to reach. As soon as Phœbus-Apollo, standing in his quadriga, had gilded to saffron the summits of fertile Mount Tmolus with his rays, the good people of Sardes were all astir, going and coming, mounting or descending the marble stairways leading from the city to the waters of the Pactolus, that opulent river whose sands Midas filled with tiny sparks of gold when he bathed in its stream. One would have supposed that each one of these good citizens was himself about to marry, so solemn and important was the demeanor of all.