"Still," said I, "the name Petit Patou conveys nothing to me." "I'm the original Petit Patou. When I took a partner we became plural. _Regardez un instant._" It was only later that I saw the significance of the instinctive French phrase. He rose, glanced around him, pounced on a little silver match-box and an empty wire waste-paper basket, and contorting his mobile face into a hideous grimace of imbecility, began to juggle with these two objects and his cigar, displaying the faultless technique of the professional. After a few throws, the cigar flew into his mouth, the matchbox fell into the opened pocket of his dinner jacket and the waste-paper basket descended over his head. For a second he stood grinning through the wire cage, in the attitude of one waiting for applause. Then swiftly he disembarrassed himself of the basket and threw the insulted cigar into the fire. "Do you think that's a dignified way for General Andrew Lackaday, C.B., to make his living--in the green skin tights of Petit Patou?" We talked far into the night. My sleep was haunted by the nightmare of the six foot four of the stringy, bony emaciation of General Lackaday in green skin tights. Chapter V To realize Petit Patou in the British General of Brigade, we must turn to the manuscript mentioned at the beginning of this story. We meet him, a raw youth, standing, one blazing summer day on the Bridge of Avignon. He insists on this episode, because, says he, the bridge is associated with important events in his life. It was not, needless to remark, the Pont d'Avignon of the gay old song, for the further arch of that was swept away by floods long ago, and it now remains a thing of pathetic uselessness. Three-quarters of the way across the Rhone might you go, and then you would come to abrupt nothingness, just the swirling river far below your arrested feet. It was the new suspension bridge, some three hundred yards further up, sadly inharmonious with the macchiolated battlements of the city and the austere mass, rising above them, of the Palace of the Popes on the one side, and, on the other, the grey antiquity of the castle of Villeneuve brooding like an ancient mother over its aged offspring, the clustering sun-baked town. The joyous generation of the Old Bridge has long since passed away, but to the present generation the New Bridge affords the same wonder and delight. For it entices like the old, from stifling streets to the haunts of Pan. There do you find leafy walks, and dells of shade, and pathways by the great cool river leading to sequestered spots where you may sit and forget the clatter of flagstones and the stuffy apartment above them for which the rent is due; where the air of early June is perfumed by wild thyme and marjoram and the far-flung sweetness of new mown hay, and where the nightingales sing. So, whenever it can, all Avignon turns out, as it has turned out for hundreds of years, on its to and fro adventure across the Bridge of Promise.