The Beautiful Lady | Page 6

hungry, I
neglected my goulasch to read these lists of names of the United States
again and again, only that I might have the thought that one of
them--though I knew not which--might be this lady's, and that in so
infinitesimal a degree I had been near her again. Will it be estimated
extreme imbecility in me when I ventured the additional confession that

I felt a great warmth and tenderness toward the possessors of all these
names, as being, if not herself, at least her compatriots?
I am now brought to the admission that before to-day I had experienced
some prejudices against the inhabitants of the North-American republic,
though not on account of great experience of my own. A year
previously I had made a disastrous excursion to Monte Carlo in the
company of a young gentleman of London who had been for several
weeks in New York and Washington and Boston, and appeared to
know very much of the country. He was never anything but tired in
speaking of it, and told me a great amount. He said many times that in
the hotels there was never a concierge or portier to give you
information where to discover the best vaudeville; there was no
concierge at all! In New York itself, my friend told me, a facchino, or
species of porter, or some such good-for-nothing, had said to him,
including a slap on the shoulder, "Well, brother, did you receive your
delayed luggage correctly?" (In this instance my studies of the
North-American idiom lead me to believe that my friend was
intentionally truthful in regard to the principalities, but mistaken in his
observation of detail.) He declared the recent willingness of the English
to take some interest in the United-Statesians to be a mistake; for their
were noisy, without real confidence in themselves; they were restless
and merely imitative instead of inventive. He told me that he was not
exceptional; all Englishmen had thought similarly for fifty or sixty
years; therefore, naturally, his opinion carried great weight with me.
And myself, to my astonishment, I had often seen parties of these
republicans become all ears and whispers when somebody called a
prince or a countess passed by. Their reverence for age itself, in
anything but a horse, had often surprised me by its artlessness, and of
all strange things in the world, I have heard them admire old customs
and old families. It was strange to me to listen, when I had believed that
their land was the only one where happily no person need worry to
remember who had been his great- grandfather.
The greatest of my own had not saved me from the decoration of the
past week, yet he was as much mine as he was Antonio Caravacioli's;
and Antonio, though impoverished, had his motor- car and dined well,

since I happened to see, in my perusal of the journal, that he had been
to dinner the evening before at the English Embassy with a great
company. "Bravo, Antonio! Find a rich foreign wife if you can, since
you cannot do well for yourself at home!" And I could say so honestly,
without spite, for all his hatred of me,--because, until I had paid my
addition, I was still the possessor of fifty francs!
Fifty francs will continue life in the body of a judicial person a long
time in Paris, and combining that knowledge and the good goulasch, I
sought diligently for "Mamies" and "Sadies" with a revived spirit. I
found neither of those adorable names--in fact, only two such
diminutives, which are more charming than our Italian ones: A Miss
Jeanie Archibald Zip and a Miss Fannie Sooter. None of the names was
harmonious with the grey pongee -- in truth, most of them were no
prettier (however less processional) than royal names. I could not
please myself that I had come closer to the rare lady; I must be
contented that the same sky covered us both, that the noise of the same
city rang in her ears as mine.
Yet that was a satisfaction, and to know that it was true gave me
mysterious breathlessness and made me hear fragments of old songs
during my walk that night. I walked very far, under the trees of the Bois,
where I stopped for a few moments to smoke a cigarette at one of the
tables outside, at Armenonville.
None of the laughing women there could be the lady I sought; and as
my refusing to command anything caused the waiter uneasiness, in
spite of my prosperous appearance, I remained but a few moments, then
trudged on, all the long way to the Cafe' de Madrid, where also she was
not.
How did I assure myself of this since I had not seen her face?