THE DREAM CIRCEAN
which came to him, not one was half so strange as the simple
and natural story which he was later to hear.
“Come,” said Frédéric, “I will present you to him.”
“Monseigneur,” he said, as Roderic stood before him,
ready to make his little bow, “let me present Monsieur
Mason, an Englishman.”
The old fellow took little notice. Said Frédéric in his
ear: “Monsieur lives on the Boulevard St. Germain, and
loves to paint the streets.”
The old man rose with alacrity, smiled, bowed, was en-
chanted to meet one of the gallant allies whose courage had—
he spoke glibly of the Alma, Inkerman, Sebastopol.
The little comedy had not been lost on Roderic. Won-
dering, he sat down beside the old nobleman.
What spell had Frédéric wrought of so potent a complexion?
“Sir,” he said, “the gallantry of the French troops at
the Malakoff was beyond all praise; it will live for ever in
history.”
To another he might have spoken of the extente cordiale ;
to this man he dared not.
Had not his brain perhaps stopped in the sixties ?
Had the catastrophe of ’70 broken his heart?
Roderic must walk warily.
But the conversation did not take the expected turn. The
old gentleman elegantly, wittily, almost gaily, chattered of art,
of music, of the changed appearance of Paris. Here, at any
rate, he was au courant des affaires.
Yet as Roderic, puzzled and pleased, finished his absinthe
he said more seriously than he had yet spoken: “I hear that
monsieur is a great painter” (Roderic modestly waved aside
II