By return mail came a letter wherein I was advised to invest in India 4 per cents or London Gas. I wrote an immediate order to have the bank purchase ten thousand pounds of India stock and sent my check for that amount, on his own bank, payable to the order of the manager. I received the stock, instantly sold it, and replaced the money to my credit, and the next day sent off an order for ten thousand pounds gas stock, and repeated the operation until I had made the impression I wanted to make on the mind of the manager, so that when I returned to London for my decisive interview and sent in my card he would at once recognize the name, F. A. Warren, as the multi-millionaire American who had been sending him ten thousand pound checks from Paris.
All the time of my stay in France I had nothing to do but enjoy myself, and I entered upon a systematic sightseeing in and around Paris. There are some strange contrasts in that old town. One day I made one of a coaching party to Fontainebleau, twenty-one miles from the city. Every foot of the road there is classic ground, and I had assiduously studied day by day the history of France. That Paris is France is nearly a truth, and I had in my mind a tolerably clear view of the history of the country and of the men who made its history. I was right there on the scene of the history-making, and I found an intensity of interest in my excursions such as I had never experienced before. The driver of the coach was an Englishman by the name of Nunn. I mention this here, as he eventually became my servant, and will appear again in the narrative.
To the Parisian hotel proprietor and shopkeeper the American visitor is truly a providence. "Mine host" looks to him for loaves and fishes, and is never deceived. The antics of our rich countrymen in Paris are portentous in their amazing prodigality, and I fear we are the laughing stock of the shopkeepers there.
At the Cafe Riche and Tortoni's I have seen extravagances in ordering expensive wines and viands by my countrymen that made me regret that the fools who were being served were not forced to toil for the mere necessaries of existence. Certainly they were unworthy stewards of the wealth heaven or the other place had bestowed on them by inheritance. I remember one boy there throwing away in vice and dissipation the fortune his father had through years of a long life spent toilsome hours in accumulating. I sat at a table near him on several occasions, when, after his banquet was half over, he used to reward the waiter with a five-hundred franc note ($100), but the proprietor was ever close at hand and would instantly despoil the garcon of his prize. He was companioned by a member of the demi-monde, who, when arrayed in male attire, as she was nightly, would cut up enough monkey tricks in one night at the Valentino or Mabille to have made the fortunes of all our comic paper artists had they been on the spot to catch her antics with a kodak and then lay them before an admiring public.
The fortune this boy had inherited was unfortunately too vast and too well-invested by his overfond and madly foolish father for the son to run through it entirely. A very few years left him an imbecile in body and mind, to become the prey of a parcel of sharks who, dressing in purple and fine linen and faring sumptuously every day, held him in a state of abject slavery and fear. One day, aboard his own yacht, off Naples, they married him to a notorious woman. Under the guardianship of his wife and her villain paramour he wandered like a spectre amid the scene of his former riot.
For long at Monte Carlo he lingered like a ghost, and at last died in Florence. The American colony attended his funeral in a body, while his widow, dissolved in tears, refused to be comforted. Although many dark stories were whispered, the Americans there forgave her all, for her grief and sorrow were so overpoweringly evident that it would have seemed a crime to doubt her tender love for the departed. After having the body embalmed, she embarked with her dead love for America, and to-day his ashes rest in that mighty city of the dead, Greenwood, under a Greek cross of white marble, bearing the date of birth and death. I went to see it last Easter week. The grave was strewn with flowers, and the pedestal bears this inscription:
"Too good for this world,
The angels bore him to heaven,
Leaving his heartbroken wife
To mourn her unspeakable loss."
Unopposed she succeeded to her husband's estate. It was large then; to-day it has grown to enormous proportions. She is not, but easily might have been, one of the Four Hundred.
At Saratoga last August I saw her sitting on the balcony of the United States Hotel—fat, wrinkled, vulgar-looking, covered with diamonds. Nemesis appears to have postponed her visit to the lady. Her life from her own standpoint has been a tremendous success. She has been philosopher enough to appreciate what an immense factor mere eating and drinking is in the sum of human enjoyment. Born with a cold heart, a constitution of iron, and the digestion of an ostrich, happily for her peace of mind she was absolutely without imagination.
