The aquarium of the Trocadero is underground. To reach it you simply walk down a hole in France and find yourself under the earth, listening to the silvery prattle of a little brook which runs over its bed of pebbles above your head, pouring down little waterfalls into endless basins of glass which line the damp arcades as far as you can see. The arcades themselves are dim, the tanks, set in the solid rock, are illuminated from above by holes in the ground, through which pours the yellow sunshine of France.
Looking upward through the glass faces of the tanks you can see the surface of the water with bubbles afloat, you can see the waterfall tumbling in; you can catch glimpses of green grass and bushes, and a bit of blue sky.
Into the tanks fall insects from the world above, and the fish sail up to the surface and lazily suck in the hapless fly or spider that tumbles onto the surface of the water.
It is a fresh-water aquarium. All the fresh-water fish of France are represented here by fine specimens—pike, barbels, tench, dace, perch, gudgeons, sea-trout, salmon, brown-trout, and that lovely delicate trout-like fish called l'Ombre de Chevallier. What it is I do not know, but it resembles our beautiful American brook-trout in shape and marking; and is probably a hybrid, cultivated by these clever French specialists in fish-propagation.
Coming to a long crystal-clear tank, I touched the glass with my finger-tip, and a slender, delicate fish, colored like mother-of-pearl, slowly turned to stare at me.
"This," said I, "is that aristocrat of the waters called the 'Grayling.' Notice its huge dorsal fin, its tender and diminutive mouth. It takes a fly like a trout, but the angler who would bring it to net must work gently and patiently, else the tender mouth tears and the fish is lost. Is it not the most beautiful of all fishes?
"'Here and there a lusty trout;
Here and there a Grayling—'
"Ah, Tennyson knew. And that reminds me, Alida," I continued, preparing to recount a personal adventure with a grayling in Austria—"that reminds me——"
I turned around to find I had been addressing the empty and somewhat humid atmosphere. My daughter Alida stood some distance away, gazing absently at a tank full of small fry; and Captain Vicômte Torchon de Cluny stood beside her, talking. Perhaps he was explaining the habits of the fish in the tank.
My daughter Dulcima and Captain de Barsac I beheld far down the arcades, strolling along without the faintest pretence of looking at anything but each other.