In the great hall, softly lit and flower-scented, the footmen in their green-and-white livery stood in two gorgeous rows to give us welcome; and Jacko, the macaw, four foot from the crest of his wicked head to the tip of his tail-feathers, dressed also in the green-and-white livery of the house, screamed his sentiments on the matter. My father had a word for everyone. It was always just so. This grand seigneur, who had made his way to fortune less with his sword than with his brilliant personality, would speak to the meanest servant familiarly, jocularly, yet never would he meet with disrespect. There was that about him which inspired fear as well as love, and he was served as few other men are served. Witness our return that night to a house as well in order as though we had come back from a trip to Compiègne instead of a two months' journey to a foreign country. He dismissed the servants with a word, and, with his hat on the back of his head, stood at the table where his letters were set out, tearing them open and flinging the unimportant ones on the floor. Whilst he was so engaged, a ring came to the door, and the footman who answered it brought him a letter sealed with a great red seal, which he tore open and read. "Aha!" muttered he. "De Morny wants to see me to-morrow. Wonder how he knew that I was back? But De Moray knows everything. Is the servant waiting, François?" "No, sir; the servant has gone." "Very well," said my father. Then to me: "Come now; get your supper, and off to bed. François!" I was led off grumbling. Joubert tucked me into bed; and as I lay listening to the carriage-wheels from the Champs Elysées bearing people home from supper-party and theatre, the journey, the Schloss Lichtenberg, the mysterious pine-forest, the drums and tramping soldiers of Carlsruhe and Mayence, the blue Rhine--all rose before me as a picture. It was the First Act of my life, an Act tragic enough; and, as the curtain of sleep fell upon it, the glimmer of the jägers' torches still struggled through that veil, with the sound of the swords, the murmur of the wind in the pine-trees, and the far-off barking of the fox in the wood. CHAPTER XIII I FALL INTO DISGRACE I was dreaming of the Countess Feliciani. She had changed all of a sudden, by the alchemy of dreamland, into little Carl. We were running together down the forest path in the woods of Lichtenberg, and the Stone Man was pursuing us, when a violent pull on my right leg awakened me, and Joubert and a burst of sunshine replaced dreamland and its shadows. It was one of Joubert's pleasant ways of awakening a child from his sleep, to catch him by the foot and nearly haul him out of bed. Oh, the agony of having to get up, straight, without any preliminary stretching and yawning; to get up with that dead, blank tiredness of childhood hanging on one like a cloak--and get into a cold bath! It was martial law with a vengeance. But there was no use in grumbling.