Presently, however, one of my inspectors came to me, wearing a terrified look:
"We've lost the track of the Roumanian!" he declared.
"You are mad!" I cried.
"No, would I were! He has left his hotel unnoticed by any of us; and we don't know what has become of him."
I flew into a rage and at once ordered a search to be made for him. It was labour lost; there was not a trace of him to be found.
For once, I was seriously uneasy. I resolved to tell the whole story to the King so that he might allow himself to be quietly guarded. But he merely shrugged his shoulders and laughed.
"You see, Paoli," he said, "I am a fatalist. If my hour has come, neither you nor I can avoid it; and I am certainly not going to let a trifle of this kind spoil my holiday. Besides, it is not the first time that I have seen danger close at hand; and I assure you that I am not afraid. Look here, a few years ago, I was returning one day with my daughter to my castle of Tatoï, near Athens. We were driving, without an escort. Suddenly, happening to turn my head, I saw a rifle barrel pointed at us from the road side, gleaming between the leaves of the bushes. I leaped up and instantly flung myself in front of my daughter. The rifle followed me. I said to myself, 'It's all over; I'm a dead man.' And what do you think I did? I have never been able to explain why, but I began to count aloud—'One, two, three'—it seemed an age; and I was just going to say, 'Four,' when the shot was fired. I closed my eyes. The bullet whistled past my ears. The startled horses ran away, we were saved and I thought no more about it. So do not let us alarm ourselves before the event, my dear Paoli: we will wait and see what happens."
I admired the King's fine coolness, of course; but I was none the easier in my mind for all that. Still, the King was right, this time, and I was wrong: we never heard anything more about the mysterious Roumanian.
5.
George I has preserved none but agreeable recollections of his different visits to Aix. In evidence of this, I will only mention the regret which he expressed to me, in one of his last letters, that the Greek crisis prevented him from making his usual trip to France in 1909: