Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images available at The Internet Archive) SYLVIA SCARLETT BOOKS BY COMPTON MACKENZIE SYLVIA SCARLETT PLASHERS MEAD HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK [ESTABLISHED 1817] THE EARLY LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF SYLVIA SCARLETT By COMPTON MACKENZIE Author of "PLASHERS MEAD" "SINISTER STREET" "CARNIVAL" ETC. [Illustration: colophon] HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON SYLVIA SCARLETT Copyright, 1918, by Harper & Brothers Printed in the United States of America PRELUDE =_Prelude_= At six o'clock on the morning of Ash Wednesday in the year 1847, the Honorable Charles Cunningham sat sipping his coffee in the restaurant of the Vendanges de Bourgogne. He was somewhat fatigued by the exertions that as "lion" of the moment he had felt bound to make, exertions that had included a display of English eccentricity and had culminated in a cotillion at a noble house in the Faubourg St.-Germain, the daughter of which had been assigned to him by Parisian gossip as his future wife. Marriage, however, did not present itself to his contemplation as an urgent duty; and he sipped his coffee, reassured by the example of his brother Saxby, who, with the responsibility of a family succession, remained a bachelor. In any case, the notion of marrying a French girl was preposterous; he was not to be flattered into an unsuitable alliance by compliments upon his French. Certainly he spoke French uncommonly well, devilishly well for an Englishman, he told himself; and he stroked his whiskers in complacent meditation. Charles Cunningham had arrived at the Vendanges de Bourgogne to watch that rowdy climax of Carnival, the _descente de la Courtille_. And now through the raw air they were coming down from Belleville, all sorts of revelers in masks and motley and rags. The noise of tin trumpets and toy drums, of catcalls and cocoricots, of laughter and cheers and whistling, came nearer. Presently the road outside was thronged for the aristocrats of the Faubourg St.-Germain to alight from their carriages and mix with the mob. This was the traditional climax of Carnival for Parisian society: every year they drove here on Ash Wednesday morning to get themselves banged on the head by bladders, to be spurted with cheap scent and pelted with sugar-plums, and to retaliate by flinging down hot louis for the painful enrichment of the masses. The noise was for a time deafening; but gradually the cold light of morning and the melancholy Lenten bells cast a gloom upon the crowd, which passed on toward the boulevards, diminishing in sound and size at every street corner.