Mustapha was now seized with an uncontrollable desire to see face to face the new allies and masters of Tunis. The Pro-Bey granted the required permission; some _ahads_ and _nicháns_ were prepared as fast as the Tunisian jewellers could make them, autograph letters containing complimentary nothings were written, and a French man-of-war was placed at his disposal. M. Roustan nominated his suite, General Elias Musalli, Dr. Mascaro, and the broker Volterra, now Master of the Tunisian Mint. The whole party assembled at the Goletta, in the wooden pavilion on piles built out into the sea, commonly called the Summer Palace, to take leave of the Bey. At the supreme moment Muhamed es Sadek placed around the neck of M. Roustan the same decoration as had up to that time been reserved only for princes and potentates. The act was logical enough: M. Roustan had become the sovereign of the nearly broken-hearted old man. Later in the day the “Jeanne d’Arc,” with its precious freight of Tunisian worthies, left for Marseilles. Nobody has appreciated the humour of the situation more keenly than M. De Blowitz, who had been for many days undergoing _malgré lui_, a gradual process of disenchantment, concerning Tunis. “The proper aim of the agents of a country,” he wrote a day or two later, “is to serve it with all their might, and have in view, as their recompense, only the honour of having served it. But in truth, if M. Roustan has substituted himself too ostentatiously for his Government, the Bey offers the more curious spectacle of a man who surpasses in self-abasement anything the East has as yet yielded of the kind. The delivery of the riband to M. Roustan is one of those sickening comedies which are only played in the extreme east and on the confines of civilisation. The journey of Mustapha, who is in a hurry to prostrate himself before his conquerors, the enthusiastic declarations of the Bey, and the lofty attitude of M. Roustan, certainly form one of those unsavoury scenes which should be preserved in history as a warning.” Five weeks before, Mustapha was described in nine-tenths of the French papers not only as an arch-enemy and an Italian emissary, but as a criminal of the deepest dye. The Kasr-es-Said Convention intervenes, and this same Mustapha now arrives in France. It is here that we must look for the _dénouement_ of this unsurpassed comedy of political folly. The correspondent of the _Daily News_ has immortalised the scene in his telegram of the 15th June 1881:—