I then sought my compartment, to learn the worst as to my position, whether above or below the necessarily offensive person who was to be my companion.
He was already there, and we exchanged the hard implacable glare that is reserved among the English for the other fellow in a wagon-lit.
When I discovered that to him had fallen the dreaded upper berth I relaxed a little, and later we were full of courtesies to each other—renunciations of hatpegs, racks, and so forth, and charming mutual concessions as to the light, which I controlled from below—so that by morning we were so friendly that he deemed me a fit recipient of his Great Paris Grievance.
This grievance, which he considered that every one should know about, bore upon the prevalence of spurious coins in the so-called Gay City and the tendency of Parisians to work them off on foreigners. As he said, a more inhospitable course one cannot conceive. Foreigners in Paris should be treated as guests, the English especially. But it is the English who are the first victims of the possessor of francs that are out of date, five-franc pieces guiltless of their country's silver, and ten-franc pieces into whose composition no gold has entered.
He had been in Paris but an hour or so when—but let me tell the story as my travelling companion told it to me.
"I don't know what your experience in Paris has been," he said, "but I have been victimised right and left."
He was now getting up, while I lay at comparative ease in my berth and watched his difficulties in the congested room and disliked his under vest.
"I had been in Paris but a few hours," he continued, "when it was necessary to pay a cabman. I handed him a franc. He examined it, laughed and returned it. I handed him another. He went through the same performance. Having found some good money to get rid of him, I sat down outside a café to try and remember where I had received the change in which these useless coins had been inserted. During a week in Paris much of my time was spent in that way."
He sighed and drew on his trousers. His braces were red.
"I showed the bad francs to a waiter," he went on, "and he, like the cabman, laughed. In fact, next to nudity, there is no theme so certain to provoke Parisian mirth as a bad coin. The first thought of every one to whom I showed my collection was to be amused." His face blackened with rage. "This cheerful callousness in a matter involving a total want of principle and straight-dealing as between man and man," he said, "denotes to what a point of cynicism the Parisians have attained."