BY THE AUTHOR OF “A SALON IN PARIS BEFORE THE WAR,” “NUMBER THIRTEEN,” “PIUS VI.,” ETC. CHAPTER III. THE LILIES. My first step was to pay a visit to the Préfecture de Police. I was received with the utmost courtesy and many half-spoken, half-intimated expressions of sympathy that were touching and unexpected. All that my sensitive pride most shrank from in my misfortune was ignored with a tact and delicacy that were both soothing and encouraging. I had felt more than once, when exposing my miserable and extraordinary situation to the police agents at home, that it required the strongest effort of professional gravity on their part not to burst out laughing in my face. No such struggle was to be seen in the countenances of the French police. They listened with interest, real or feigned, to my story, and invited what confidence I had to give by the matter-of-fact simplicity with which they set to work to put the few pieces of the puzzle together, and to endeavor to read some clew in them. I returned to my hotel after this interview more cheered and sanguine than the incident itself reasonably warranted. It was scarcely two years since I had been in Paris, yet since that first visit I found it singularly altered. I could not say exactly how; but it was not the same. It had struck me when I first saw it as the place above all I had yet seen for a man to build an earthly paradise to himself; the air was full of brightness, redolent of light-hearted pleasure; the aspect of the city, the looks of the people, suggested at every point the Epicurean motto, “Eat, drink, and be merry; for to-morrow we die!” But it was different now. Perhaps the change was in me; in the world within rather than the world without. The chord that had formerly answered to the touch of the vivacious gayety of the place was broken. I walked through the streets and boulevards now with wide-open, disenchanted eyes, critical and unsympathetic. Things that had passed unheeded before appeared to me with a new meaning. What struck me as most disagreeable, and with a sense of complete novelty, was the widespread popularity which the devil apparently enjoyed amongst the Parisians. If, as we may assume, the popularity of a name implies the popularity of the person or the idea that it represents, it is difficult to exaggerate the esteem and favor which Satan commands in the city of bonnets and revolutions. You can scarcely pass through any of the thoroughfares without seeing his name emblazoned on a shop-window, or his figure carved or bedaubed in some grotesque or hideous guise on a sign-board inviting you to enter and spend your money under his patronage. There are devils dancing and devils grinning, devils fat and devils lean, a _diable vert_ and a _diable rose_, a _bon diable_, a _diable à quatre_--every conceivable shape and color of _diable_, in fact, in the range of the infernal hierarchy. He stands as high in favor with the literary guild