Nevertheless, western civilisation began stealthily to exert its formidable influence over his tastes, if not his habits. We had not been a week in Paris before our guest thought it better, on his afternoon excursions, to replace the _sampot_ with the conventional European trousers and his out-of-date cutaway with a faultless frock-coat. But for his yellow complexion, his slanting eyes and his woolly hair, he would have looked a regular dandy! Ever eager to appear good-natured and polite, he kissed the daughters of the hall-porter at the Colonial Office, each time he went to the Pavillion de Flore, and shook hands with the messengers at the Foreign Office and with all the salesmen at the Bon Marché, which he made a point of visiting. Again, when passing through the Place Victor-Hugo, he never failed to take off his hat with a great flourish to our national poet. Lastly, I had the greatest difficulty in keeping him from sending sacred offerings to the tomb of Napoleon I, "whom we hold in veneration in Cambodia," he explained to me through the interpreter. Hearing, on the other hand, that European sovereigns are accustomed to leave their cards on certain official personages, he asked me to order him a hundred worded as follows: PREAS BAT SOMDACH PREAS SISOWATH CHOM CHAKREPONGS. 4. Nevertheless, in spite of the ever fresh surprises which Paris had in store for him and of their undoubted attraction for his mind, the King soon began to feel a certain lassitude: "Paris," he said to me, "is a wonderful, but tiring city. The houses are too high and there are too many carriages. How is it that you still allow horse-carriages? If I were the master here, I would abolish them and allow nothing but motors." When he had visited the public buildings and done the sights and been to Fontainebleau and Versailles and Compiègne and had the mechanism of the phonographs and cinematographs explained to him he began to bore himself. He then thought of his dancing-girls, whom he had left behind at Marseilles, and sent for them to Paris on the pretext of exhibiting them at a garden-party given by the president of the republic at the Élysée. One fine morning, they all landed at the Gare de Lyon, a little bewildered, a little flurried, in the charge of the grim Princess Soumphady, who was dressed in a violet _sampot_, with a stream of diamonds round her neck. They arrived looking like so many lost sheep, accompanied by their six readers, their eight singers, their four dressers, their two comedians and their six musicians. The dancers' advent created quite a sensation in the district of the Avenue Malakoff. They were quartered opposite the royal "palace," in a building at the back of a courtyard, and, when at last good King Sisowath saw them from his balcony, a broad smile of happiness lit up his yellow face.