On our arrival at Genoa (I having tasted nothing but the juice of an orange, to the astonishment of the courier, who could not make out whether I belonged to this world or the next), I found that, in changing carriages at Pietra Santa, my finery had been left behind.
“Confound it all!” I thought; “this looks as if some cursed good angel stood in the way of my plan.”
Again I hunted up a dressmaker, and after trying three, succeeded in getting a new outfit. Meanwhile, the Sardinian people, seeing me trotting after work-girls like this, took it into their sapient heads that I must be a conspirator, a carbonero, a liberator, and refused to viser my passport for Turin. I must go by Nice.
“Then, for heaven’s sake, viser it for Nice. I don’t care. I’ll go viâ the infernal regions so long as I get through.”
Which was the greater fool—the policeman, who saw in every Frenchman an emissary of the Revolution, or myself, who thought I could not set foot in Paris undisguised; forgetting that, by hiding for a day in a hotel, I could have found fifty women to rig me out perfectly?
Self-engrossed people are really delightful. They fancy everyone is thinking about them, and the deadly earnest with which they act up to the idea is simply delicious!
So, behold me on my way to Nice, going over and over my little Parisian drama.
Disguised as the Countess de M.’s lady’s-maid, I would go to the house about nine o’clock with an important letter. While it was being read, I would pull out my double-barrelled pistols, kill number one and number two, seize number three by the hair and finish her off likewise; after which, if this vocal and instrumental concert had gathered an audience, I would turn the fourth barrel upon myself. Should it miss fire (such things happen occasionally), I had a final resource in my little bottles.
Grand climax! It seems rather a pity it never came off.
Now, despite my rage, I began to say: