The chasseur touched his cap, smiled, and hopefully held out his large empty hand.
"Go to the devil," I said gently; "it is not for what you have done but for what you have not done that I give you this silver piece," and I paid the tribute which I despised myself for paying. Still, his gay smile and prompt salute are certainly worth something to see, but what their precise value may be you can only determine when, on returning to New York, you hear a gripman curse a woman for crossing the sacred tracks of the Metropolitan Street Railroad Company. So, with my daughter Dulcima and my daughter Alida, and with a wagon-load of baggage, I left the gorgeously gilded Hôtel des Michetons—for these three reasons:
Number one: it was full of Americans.
Number two: that entire section of Paris resembled a slice of the Waldorf-Astoria.
Number three: I wanted to be rid of the New York Herald. Surely somewhere in Paris there existed French newspapers, French people, and French speech. I meant to discover them or write and complain to the Outlook.
The new hotel I had selected was called the Hôtel de l'Univers. I had noticed it while wandering out of the Luxembourg Gardens. It appeared to be a well situated, modest, clean hotel, and not only thoroughly respectable—which the great gilded Hôtel des Michetons was not—but also typically and thoroughly French. So I took an apartment on the first floor and laid my plans to dine out every evening with my daughters.
They were naturally not favourably impressed with the Hôtel de l'Univers, but I insisted on trying it for a week, desiring that my daughters should have at least a brief experience in a typical French hotel.
On the third day of our stay my daughters asked me why the guests at the Hôtel de l'Univers all appeared to be afflicted in one way or another. I myself had noticed that many of the guests wore court-plaster on hands and faces, and some even had their hands bandaged in slings.
I thought, too, that the passers-by in the street eyed the modest hotel with an interest somewhat out of proportion to its importance. But I set that down to French alertness and inbred curiosity, and dismissed the subject from my mind. The hotel was pretty clean and highly respectable. Titled names were not wanting among the guests, and the perfect courtesy of the proprietor, his servants, and of the guests was most refreshing after the carelessness and bad manners of the crowds at the Hôtel des Michetons.
"Can it be possible?" said Alida, as we three strolled out of our hotel into the Boulevard St. Michel.