“Hush! I am Monna Lisa,” replied the Man with the Grin.
“Then at last we have found you!” exclaimed the Chief of the Police. “All France has been mourning your loss. Come with me quickly. You must return immediately to the Louvre.”
“Yes, yes,” assented the light-headed one, descending from his chair and confidently passing his arm under the arm of M. Lépine. “Take me home to the Louvre.”
A wonderful spectacle, the Man with the Grin disappearing on the arm of the Chief of the Police, relating, as he went, that he had escaped from his frame in the Louvre in the dead of the night.
A wonderful spectacle was M. Lépine a few nights later, when “directing operations” at a disastrous fire on the Boulevard Sebastopol. In the sight of the crowd he struggled into oilskins, and next was to be seen stationing the engines, dragging about hose, pushing forward ladders, signalling and shouting forth encouragement and patience to the occupants of the blazing house. On this, as on all similar occasions, M. Lépine was blackened and singed when at last the fire had been mastered. But never have I beheld him so blackened, so dishevelled and battered, so courageous and capable as when he came to the rescue of the “victims” of the devastating Paris floods. Up and down the swollen, lurid river he careered in a shabby old boat. At once-pleasant river-side places, such as Boulogne and Surèsnes, he was to be found chest-deep in the turbid, yellow-green water—always signalling, always “firmly” and “actively” “directing operations.” He climbed into the upper windows of tottering, flooded houses; briskly made his way across narrow plank bridges; distributed here, there and everywhere blankets, medicaments, provisions—the mud and slime of the river caked hard on his oilskins. As he passed by in his boat, the most bedraggled figure in Paris, loud cries of “Vive Lépine” from the bridges and quays; and, indeed, wherever he went, M. le Préfet de Police excited respect and admiration. I see him, in top hat and frock coat, “receiving” the late King Edward VII. in the draughty Northern Station. I see him pointing out the beauties of Paris to the present Prince of Wales. I see him surrounded by the turbulent students of the Latin Quarter, whither he has been summoned to check their demonstrations against some unpopular professor. I see him examining (in the interests of the public) the clocks of motor cabs, the cushions of railway carriages, the seating conditions in theatres, the very benches and penny chairs in the Bois de Boulogne. Finally, I see him as he is to-day; no longer Chief of the Police, but a private “citizen,” established in a spacious, comfortable appartement, which, to the admiration and excitement of naïve, bourgeois Parisians, is equipped with no fewer than two bathrooms.
“With two bathrooms our admirable Lépine will have plenty to do,” states M. le Bourgeois. “They are a responsibility, as well as a pleasure; but, of course, they will not prove too much for a man like Lépine.” Then up speaks a primitive soul: “One is free to bathe and free not to bathe. But to have two bathrooms is scandalous: and I should not have thought it of Lépine.”
However, in the opinion of a third critic, M. Lépine should be permitted to have ninety-nine bathrooms if he likes. Twenty-two years Chief of the Police, he is now entitled to do as he pleases. So leave his two bathrooms alone.
“When a man has retired, he must have distractions with which to occupy his mind and his leisure.”
But if, as reported, M. Lépine loves his pair of bathrooms, he loves the streets better. As in his official days, behold him here, there and everywhere. A brawl or a fire, and there he is. Now in an omnibus, next in the underground railway, up at Montmartre, down on the boulevards, amidst exclamations of “Voilà Lépine!” and the salutes of the police. Only a private “citizen,” but he is still addressed as “M. le Préfet.” Merely the master of a comfortable appartement, of a couple of bathrooms—but is that enough for a Frenchman of action and genius? Gossips predict that M. Lépine will next be seen in the Chamber of Deputies, or that he will help M. Georges Clemenceau to wake up the Senate—the “Palais du Sommeil.” For my own part I fancy that, should a crisis arrive, the ex-Chief of the Police will be requested to “direct operations” again.
“There is a telephone in my new home,” M. Lépine is reported to have said. “If the Government should want me back, it has only to ring me up.”