Though I was eighteen, I was still very much of a child, and that is perhaps why I felt an affection for the old gentleman at almost first sight. He remembered my father perfectly well; and, with a shade of sadness and wreathed in his cigarette smoke, he fell into a little reverie. We talked--he, my guardian, and I. My lameness was explained and commiserated, and, when our audience was ended and M. Ollivier was announced as waiting, he pushed us out of his cabinet, holding our hands affectionately, patting my shoulder, and all with such a grace and goodness of heart as to make me for ever his admirer and friend. Ah, that was a good man lost in an Emperor! CHAPTER XVIII MY FIRST NIGHT IN PARIS "I am due to dine at the Duc de Bassano's," said my guardian as I parted with him outside the Tuileries. "So, if we do not see one another till to-morrow morning, au revoir. You have plenty of money in your pocket, Paris is before you, you are young: amuse yourself." Then the old gentleman marched off, and left me standing on the pavement. I could not help recalling my father's words in the room of the Duc de Morny, years ago, when he dismissed me: "Go and play." I had five hundred francs in my pocket, I possessed rooms in the Place Vendôme, a princely fortune lay at my back, I had a guardian, everything that a guardian ought to be from a young man's point of view, I had just shaken hands with the Emperor, I had the entrée of the very best of society in France, yet I doubt if you could have found a more forlorn creature than myself if you had searched the whole of Paris. I did not know where to go or what to do, so I went back to the Place Vendôme, superintended the unpacking of my things, looked at my new clothes, and at seven o'clock, called by the lovely evening, I went out again, proposing to myself to dine somewhere and see life. Over the western sky, brilliant and liquid as a topaz, hung the evening star. Paris was preparing for the festival of the night, wrapping herself in the dark gauze of shadows and spangling herself with lights. I hung on the Pont des Arts, looking at the dark lilac of the Seine, looking at the drifting barges, listening to the sounds of the city. Then I walked on. Oh, there is no doubt that we are led in this world when we seem to lead, and that when we take a direction that brings us to fate it is not by our own volition. This I was soon to prove. I walked on--walked in the blindness of reverie--and opened my eyes to find myself in a new world. A broad boulevard, a blaze of lights, cafés thronged to the pavement, the music of barrel-organs, laughter, and a crowd.