"Please," said I, "can you tell me where I can find the Countess Feliciani?" A dead silence took the room, for my nervousness had made me speak louder than I intended. People looked at one another; an awkward silence it must have been following the voice of the enfant terrible flinging the name of the woman they had cast out and deserted into the face of these worldlings who had come to examine her effects and snatch bargains from her ruin. M. Hamard, aghast, stared down at me through his spectacles. "You---- Who are you?" said he. "I am her friend. My name is Patrick Mahon. My father is General Count Mahon, and I wish to see the Countess Feliciani." M. Hamard seized a pen from the desk, scribbled some words on a piece of paper, and handed it to me. "Go," he said. "That is the address. You are interrupting the sale." Then, with the paper in my hand, I came back through the crush without difficulty, for the crowd made a lane for me down which I walked, paper in hand, a child of nine, the last and only friend of the once great and powerful Felicianis. I read the address on the piece of paper to the driver of the cabriolet. "Ma foi!" said he, "but that is a long way from here." "Drive me there," said I. "Yes; that is all very well, but how about my fare?" I showed him my napoleon, got into the vehicle, and we drove off. It was indeed a long way from there. We retook the route by which we had come, we drove through the broad streets, through the great boulevards, and then we plunged into a quarter of the city where the streets were shrunken and mean, where the people were in keeping with the streets, and the light of the bright September day seemed dull as the light of December. At the Hôtel de Mayence in the Rue Ancelot we drew up. It was a respectable, third-rate hotel. A black cat was crouched in the doorway, watching the street with imperturbable yellow eyes, and a waiter with a stained serviette in his hand made his appearance at the sound of the vehicle drawing up. Yes; Madame Feliciani was in: he would go up and see whether she could receive visitors. I waited, trying to make friends with the sphinx-like cat; then I was shown upstairs, and into a shabby sitting-room overlooking the street. By the window, stitching at a child's small garment, sat an old lady with snow-white hair. It was the Countess Feliciani. It was as if I had seen by some horrible enchantment a woman of thirty-five, happy and beautiful, surrounded by the wealth and luxury of life, suddenly withered, touched by the wand of some malevolent fairy and transformed into a woman old and poor. It was my first lesson in the realities of life, this fairy tale, which, for hidden terror, put Vogel's story of the old woman who made the whistles completely in the shade.