Cléo was dressed in the same clothes she had worn on her escape from the Gaston de Paris. She had borrowed a hat from one of the ladies on board and stockings and other things from another lady; but she still wore round her waist the leather belt with the empty knife sheath.
As she stood on deck, now, waiting whilst the Carcassonne berthed at the wharf alongside a great Messagerie steamer, she carried over her arm the oilskin coat and, by its elastic band, the sou’wester. They were old friends.
Then when the hawsers had been passed and the gang plank was being run out she saw amongst the crowd on the wharf Monsieur de Brie and Madame de Brie, also a number of well-dressed people, Parisians some of them.
Then she was being embraced by Madame de Brie and trying at the same time to acknowledge the salute of Monsieur Bonvalot, her lawyer and man of affairs, a stout pale man with long Dundreary whiskers who had come from Paris to receive her.
All this crowd had not come purely on account of Cléo. Beside the people interested in her there were several friends and relations of Prince Selm, also his lawyer.
“I have taken rooms at the Hotel Noailles,” said Madame de Brie, “and I have brought you some clothes. Oh, my poor child, what you must have suffered. But why did the people on board not lend you some better things?”
“Oh, my clothes are all right,” said Cléo, “people wanted to lend me things, but I am quite comfortable in these.”
She was looking about in search of Raft who was nowhere to be seen.
Then she was seized by the rest, by the Comtesse de Mirandole, by Madame de Florey, and several others who had stopped at Marseilles—on their way to Monte Carlo—to meet the Carcassonne and greet the girl who had alone survived the wreck of the Gaston de Paris, some of these people knew her only slightly, but once a person becomes famous or notorious it is astonishing how slight acquaintanceship blossoms into full friendship.
Several photographers from the illustrated papers were amongst the crowd and a Pathé operator was on the quay.