I.
THE LION OF THE CHAUSSÉE D'ANTIN.
Ma mère est à Paris,
Mon père est à Versailles.
Et moi je suis ici.
Pour chanter sur la paille,
L'amour! L'amour!
La nuit comme le jour.
Humming this popular if not over-recherché ditty, a man sat sketching in pastels, one morning, in his rooms at Numéro 10, Rue des Mauvais Sujets, Chaussée d' Antin, Paris.
The band of the national guard, the marchands crying "Coco!" the charlatans puffing everything from elixirs to lead-pencils, the Empress and Mme. d'Alve passing in their carriage, the tramp of some Zouaves just returned from Algeria—nothing in the street below disturbed him; he went sketching on as if his life depended on the completion of the picture. He was a man about thirty-three, middle height, and eminently graceful. He was half Bohemian, half English, and the animation of the one nation and the hauteur of the other were by turns expressed on his chiselled features as his thoughts moved with his pencil. The stamp of his good blood was on him; his face would have attracted and interested in ever so large a crowd. He was very pale, and there was a tired look on his wide, powerful forehead and in his long dark eyes, and a weary line or two about his handsome mouth, as if he had exhausted his youth very quickly; and, indeed, to see life as he had seen it is somewhat a fatiguing process, and apt to make one blasé before one's time.
The rooms in which he sat were intensely comfortable, and very provocative to a quiet pipe and idleness. To be sure, if one judged his tastes by them, they were not probably, to use the popular jargon, "healthy," for they had nothing very domestic or John Halifaxish about them, and were certainly not calculated to gratify the eyes of maiden aunts and spinster sisters.
There were fencing-foils, pistols, tobacco-boxes of every style and order, from ballet-girls to terriers' heads. There were three or four cockatoos and parrots on stands chattering bits of Quartier Latin songs, or imitating the cries in the street below. There were cards, dice-boxes, albums à rire, meerschaums, lorgnons, pink notes, no end of De Kock's and Lebrun's books, and all the etcæteras of chambres de garçon strewed about: and there were things, too—pictures, statuettes, fauteuils, and a breakfast-service of Sèvres and silver—that Du Barry need not have scrupled to put in her "petite bon-bonnière" at Luciennes.
So busy was he sketching and singing