"Jacques de Savignac."
It was all clear to me now—pitifully clear—the garçonnière had gone with the rest.
On one of my flying trips to Paris I looked them up in their refuge, in a slit of a street. Here they had managed to live by the strictest economy, in a plain little nest under the roof, composed of two rooms and a closet for a kitchen.
One night, early in June, after some persuasion, I forced him to go with me to one of those sparkling risquée little comedies at the Palais Royal which he loved, and so on to supper at the Café de la Paix, where that great gipsy, Boldi, warms the heart with his fiddle.
The opera was just out, when we reached our table, close to the band. Beauty and the Beast were arriving, and wraps of sheen and lace were being slipped from fair shoulders into the fat waiting hands of the garçons, while the busy maître d'hôtel beamed with his nightly smile and jotted down the orders.
The snug supper room glittered with light, clean linen and shining glass. Now that the theatres were out, it had become awake with the chatter with which these little midnight suppers begin—suppers that so often end in confidences, jealousy and even tears, that need only the merriest tone of a gipsy's fiddle to turn to laughter.
Boldi is an expert at this. He watches those to whom he plays, singling out the one who needs his fiddle most, and to-night he was watching de Savignac.
We had finished our steaming dish of lobster, smothered in a spiced sauce that makes a cold dry wine only half quench one's thirst, and were proceeding with a crisp salad when Boldi, with a rushing crescendo slipped into a delicious waltz. De Savignac now sat with his chin sunk heavily in his hands, drinking in the melody with its spirited accompaniment as the cymballist's flexible hammers flew over the resonant strings, the violins following the master in the red coat, with that keen alertness with which all real gipsies play. I realized now, what the playing of a gipsy meant to him. By the end of the waltz De Savignac's eyes were shining.
Boldi turned to our table and bowed.