"I want to see some museums to-day," he would say at eleven o'clock. "We will start at two."
I at once informed the minister of fine-arts, who told off his officials to receive him; I telephoned to the military governor of Paris to send an escort.
At three o'clock, we were still waiting. At last, just about four, he appeared, with a look of indifference and care on his face, and told me that he would much prefer to go for a drive in the Bois de Boulogne.
One day, after he had spent the morning in listening to a chapter of the life of Napoleon I, he beckoned to me on his way to lunch.
"M. Paoli," he said, "I want to go to the Château de Fontainebleau to-day."
"Well, Sir, you see."
"Quick, quick!"
There was no arguing the matter. I rushed to the telephone, warned the panic-stricken P. L. M. Co., that we must have a special train at all costs and informed the keeper of the palace and the dumb-foundered sub-prefect of our imminent arrival at Fontainebleau.
When the Shah, still under the influence of his morning's course of reading, stepped from the carriage, two hours later, before the gate of the palace, he was seized with a strange freak: he demanded that the dragoons who had formed his escort from the station should dismount and enter the famous Cour des Adieux after him. Next he made them fall into line in the middle of the great quadrangle, leant against the steps, looked at them long and fondly, muttered a few sentences in Persian and then disappeared inside the palace.
Greatly alarmed, we thought at first that he had gone mad; at last we understood: he had been enacting the scene in which the emperor takes leave of his grenadiers. It may have been very flattering for the dragoons; I doubt if it was quite so flattering for Napoleon.