The Mountebank

On the occasion of our last meeting when I kept you up to an ungodly hour of the morning with the story of my wretched affairs to which you patiently listened without seeming bo...

Our hosts, the Verity-Stewarts, were pleasant people, old friends of mine, inhabiting a Somerset manor-house which had belonged to their family since the days of Charles the Sec...

It was rather rapid, this intimacy between the odd assorted pair--the high-bred woman of fervid action and the mild and gawky Colonel born in a travelling circus. Holding the ke...

Like Ancient Gaul, time is nowadays divided into three parts, before, during and after the war. The lives of most men are split into these three hard and fast sections. And the...

We meet him, a raw youth, standing, one blazing summer day on the Bridge of Avignon. He insists on this episode, because, says he, the bridge is associated with important events...

A kiss must mean either very much or very little. There are maidens to whom it signifies a life's consecration. There are men whose blood it fires with burning passion. There ar...

It was a successful combination. Bakkus sang his ballads and an occasional humorous song of the moment to Andrew's accompaniment on mandolin or one-stringed violin, and Andrew c...

We behold Petit Patou now definitely launched on his career. Why the execution of Bakkus's (literally) cynical suggestion should have met with instant success, neither he nor An...

They sat awhile and talked of the tragedy, the dead Prépimpin, at once a link and a barrier between them, lying at their feet. Her ready sympathy brought her near; but while the...

That was the beginning of the combination known a little while afterwards as _Les Petit Patou_. Elodie, receptive, imitative, histrionic, showed herself from the start an apt pu...

The outbreak of war knocked the Petit Patou variety combination silly, as it knocked many thousands of other combinations in France. One day it was a going concern worth a prett...

That was the devil of it. He had met Lady Auriol Dayne. He had found in that frank and capable young woman--or thought he had found, which comes to the same thing--the Princesse...

Through one of the little ironies of fate, my mission at the Peace Conference ended a day or two after Andrew's arrival in Paris, so that when he called at my hotel I had alread...

While Lady Auriol Dayne was rocking about the Outer Hebrides, we find Andrew Lackaday in Paris confronted with the grim necessity of earning a livelihood. His pre-war savings ha...

The unventilated dressing-room of the Olympia Music-Hall in Marseilles reeked of grease paint, stale human exhalations, the acrid odour, creeping up the iron stairs, of a mangy...

She did not repeat the reproach, nor did Andrew put to her the question which he had asked himself. The amicable placidity unruffled by quarrel, which marked their relations, wa...

The real discussion between them of the change that the death of Raoul Marescaux might bring about in their relations, did not take place till the next day. Each felt it as a su...

Without desiring to interfere with the sale of guide-books, I may say that Clermont-Ferrand is a great big town, the principal city of Auvergne, and devotes itself to turning ou...

Soon afterwards I met Horatio Bakkus. With his white hair, ascetic, clean-shaved face and deep dark eyes he looked like an Italian ecclesiastic. One's glance instinctively sough...

"The whole wretched tragedy. I came to you a year ago with my heart in my hand--the only human creature living who I thought could help me. And you've let me down like this. It'...

The first sign of commotion in the morning was a note from Bakkus, whose turn it was to act as luncheon host. Our friends at Clermont-Ferrand, said he, had cried off. They had a...

Lady Auriol, myself and the car met punctually at the hotel door at ten o'clock. There was also a _chasseur_ with Lady Auriol's dust-coat and binoculars, and a _concierge_ with...

I gasped for a few seconds. Then I accomplished my life's effort in self-control. My whole being clamoured for an explosion equally violent of compressed mirth. I ached to lie b...