CHAPTER XVII.

M. de Pommerelle, one of the most popular members of that club where the momentous game of baccarat, which we have already described, took place, seized the opportunity of delivering himself to his three friends, M. de Morin, Périères, and Delange, on the evening before their departure, in something like the following terms—

"My dear friends, I adore travels, I burn to accept your invitation to follow you to Africa, and I would give my whole fortune, as well as the contents of the public exchequer, especially the latter, to pay a visit in your society to those marvellous regions which you are going to traverse. And nothing would be easier for me than to accompany you. I am a bachelor and an orphan, and though I have a few relatives, scattered here and there about the left bank of the Seine, from the Esplanade des Invalides to the Rue du Bac, they are such utter strangers to me that I do not care one jot about them. Friends I have none, except yourselves. I have no incumbrances whatever, and my private income is ample enough to allow or my following you and giving myself up, without the slightest risk of ruin, to any amount of African dissipation. But, notwithstanding all this, I am not going with you. And now for my reasons—

"I am Parisian to the back-bone, and as thoroughly a man about town as it is possible for any human being to be. I had scarcely left Paris, last summer, to go to Trouville, at my doctor's suggestion, for fear of cholera, indeed I had not got beyond Maison-Lafitte, before I was tempted to take a return train. By the time I reached Nantes I was restless and uneasy, and I would have given anything if I could have set eyes on the steps of Tortoni's. At Elbeuf I was a prey to the deepest dejection, and everybody else in the carriage seemed to be similarly affected. You would have thought it was a mourning coach, bringing back from the cemetery a cargo of rightful heirs disinherited by the defunct. At Serquigny the refreshment-room failed to charm. I absolutely refused to go into it. I did not want anything and, if I had, I could not have taken it, for my stomach was as dejected as my heart. The sight of the pastures of Liseaux and the cattle grazing on the plain gave fresh impulse to my melancholy. The silence, the calm, the repose of nature affected my nerves, and my agitation became extreme. My fellow passengers grew uneasy and huddled together in alarm. When I arrived at Trouville, I rushed into my room at the hotel, closed the shutters so that I might not catch sight of the sea, and burst into a flood of tears. I need scarcely tell you that on the following morning I left for Paris by the first train, and that I told the cholera it might seize on me, do whatever it liked with me, on condition that it did not banish me from Paris.

"Say what you like, my dear fellows, I simply cannot do without those wretched Boulevards, which commence at the Madeleine and end just before you come to the Rue da Faubourg-Montmartre. They are dusty, dirty, smoky—I admit all that. In the summer my boots are incrusted with the asphalte which melts under my feet. In the winter I flounder about in a mass of sticky mud, which is at the same time as slippery as ice. At all seasons of the year the gas lamps shed around their sickly light. The trees weep in vain for leaves, but I have been accustomed ever since my birth and theirs to the sight of their trunks alone, and I should be annoyed if they afforded any shade, for then they would not be my trees.

"From noon to 1 a.m. I cannot get away from the sight of those miserable little kiosques where so much silliness goes on, nor from the theatres in which, for the last twenty years, the same actresses have acted the same pieces, nor from those picturesque hired carriages, closed in summer and open in winter, whose horses care as much for their drivers as the drivers do for us. I am bound to jostle and be jostled by the same loungers, male and female, the same poor, the same rich, always the same, beggars, bohemians, men who have, men who have had, and men who never had a name, virtue and vice, honour and disgrace; rags and ermine brush past me in turn, and in turn I take off my hat to the tip-tilted nose, or the modest eyes so bashfully cast down, or the bald-headed ancient. I must shake hands warmly with jolly Mrs. This, or just touch the tips of Miss That's delicate fingers; I must inhale the noisome vapours which steam out of the half-open _café_, and the delicious essence of verbena which ever hangs around the footsteps of the Countess X. In a word, these elbowings to and fro, the bow given or received, the 'how d'ye do?' to one, and 'very well, thank you,' to another, the crowd, the smells, the lights, this life itself—all, all are indispensable to me, and away from them I should droop, and wither, and die.

"And yet, I repeat, I adore travels, in all probability because I have never done any travelling. The New Library in the Boulevard des Italiens never sees any one but me. Achilla Heymann and Ménard, those intelligent _employés_ at Lévy's, send me, by the cart load, volume upon volume of the adventures of every traveller, known or unknown. An author need only go a hundred leagues from Paris to secure a place in my esteem. I read him attentively, I admire and I revere him. In short, within the walls of my own room I am one of the most remarkable travellers the world ever saw.

"You have now heard my confession, and have by this time learnt, first of all, that you will have to do without me, and, secondly, that you can do me a great service, by giving me a full, true, and particular description of every country through which you pass, by jotting down for me all sorts of information and all kinds of random notes. I shall enter thoroughly into the spirit of your letters, study them, learn them by heart; I shall travel in thought with you, and I will bless you for the pleasant half hours I know you will have in store for me.

"You need not say a word about yourselves, my dear fellows. The fact of your writing to me will be a proof positive that you are well, and that is all I care about, as far as you are concerned. No, I shall like you ever so much better if you will introduce me to the negroes and negresses, the he-savages and she-savages of your acquaintance. I have spoken. Do you swear to do as I ask you?"

And, like the three Horatii, they raised their hands on high and sware.