Madame came home after the armistice with Austria, and, being discharged of liability to the propagandist headquarters, found herself a free and idle woman. The first time for more than four years.
She had a little money from her late husband (the real one), and had been lavishly paid for her services during the war. War prices in London seemed quite moderate to her after the extortions of France and Italy. She re-occupied her old rooms near Shaftesbury Avenue—and incidentally made homeless a pair of exiled Belgians—and fed after the fashion that she loved in the restaurants of Soho. Madame enjoyed her food. She always scoffed at Beauty Specialists. "Look at me," she would say. "Look closely at my skin, at my hair, at my teeth if you like. What you see is God's gift improved by exact care for my health. I do physical exercises for twenty minutes every night and morning. I plunge all over into cold water whenever I can get together enough to cover me, and I eat and drink whatever I like. I shall go on living for just as long as I am beautiful and healthy. When I have to think of my digestion or of the colour of my skin, I shall say Good-bye and go West in a dream of morphia." Superficially, Madame is a Roman Catholic; at heart she is a Greek Pagan.
It was at La Grande Patisserie Belge that Madame stumbled across the lawyer who was fated to introduce her to the Cannibal of whom she told me in Whitehall.
It was a melancholy afternoon in January, peace had not brought plenty—especially of coal—and Madame was fortifying herself against the damp chills of London by long draughts of the hottest coffee and the sweetest and stickiest confectionery which even she could relish. About six feet distant, on what one may describe as her port quarter, sat a middle-aged Englishman whose bagging clothes showed that war rations had dealt sorely with his once ample person. Madame, who without turning her head examined him in critical detail, judged that his loss in weight was three stone. He had the clean, shaven face and alert aspect of a lawyer or doctor. In fancied security a little to the left and rear of Madame Gilbert the stranger stared openly at her cheek and ear and the coils of bright copper hair. Madame knew that he was watching her, and rather liked the scrutiny. She had recognized him at once, and would have been slightly humiliated if he had failed to be interested in her. It is true that she had met him but once before in her life, and that some four years since, but as Madame had condescended to recollect him—I have said that her memory for faces was royal—a failure on his part to remember her would have been an offence unpardonable.
Madame continued to munch sweet stuff, and the man, his tea completed, rose, paid his bill, and then passed slowly in front of her. He needed encouragement before he would speak. So Madame gave it, a quick look and a smile of invitation. He bowed.
"Have I not the honour to meet again the Signora Guilberti?" said he.
"The Signora Guilberti," assented Madame, "or Madame Guilbert, or Madame Gilbert, as rendered by the rough English tongue. I have stooped to anglicise my name," she went on, "though I hate the clipped English version." She indicated a chair, and the lawyer—he was a lawyer—sat down.
"Is it possible that Madame honours me with remembrance?"
"Let me place you," said she, happy in the display of her accomplishments, "and don't seek to guide my memory. It was in the Spring of 1915, at a reception in the garden of Devonshire House. You were in attendance upon Her Majesty the Queen-Mother of Portugal. There were present representatives of the Italian Red Cross, for Italy, the land of my late husband, had ranged herself with the Allies. You are a lawyer of the haute noblesse. Your clients are peers and princes, of old princes in exile and of new peers in possession. I recall you most distinctly, though at that time, my poor friend, you were not a little portly, and now you are a man shrunken."