When Lafcadio came down in his turn, the crowd cheered him as a hero.
“They take me for a clown,” thought he, as he roughly and ungraciously repulsed their greetings, exasperated at feeling himself blush. But when the young lady, whom he again approached, shyly held out to him his hat and stick and with them the purse she had promised, he took it with a smile, emptied it of the sixty francs that it contained, and gave the money to the poor mother, who was smothering her children with kisses.
“May I keep the purse in remembrance of you, Mademoiselle?”
He kissed the little embroidered purse. The two looked at each other for a moment. The young girl was agitated and paler than ever; she seemed desirous of speaking, but Lafcadio abruptly turned on his heel and opened a way through the crowd with his stick. His air was so forbidding that they very soon stopped cheering and following him.
He regained the Luxembourg, made a hasty meal at the restaurant Gambrinus near the Odéon and returned swiftly to his room. There under a board in the floor he kept his store of money; three twenty-franc pieces and one ten-franc piece were extracted from their hiding-place. He reckoned:
| Visiting-cards | six francs |
| A pair of gloves | five francs |
| A tie | five francs (how shall I get anything decent at that price?) |
| A pair of shoes | thirty-five francs (I shan’t use them long.) |
| Left over | nineteen francs for emergencies. |
(Lafcadio had a horror of owing anything to anyone and always paid ready money.)
He went to a wardrobe and pulled out a suit made of soft dark tweed, perfectly cut and still fresh.
“Unfortunately,” he said to himself, “I’ve grown since....” His thoughts went back to that dazzling time, not so long ago, when he used to dance gaily off with the Marquis de Gesvres (the last of his uncles) to the tailor’s, the hatter’s, the shirtmaker’s.
Ill-fitting clothes were as shocking to Lafcadio as lying to a Calvinist.