new French plays, I had come to Paris for the production of _Notre Dame
de la Lune_ at the Vaudeville.

And as I told him the idea occurred to me for positively the first time:

"By the way, I suppose you aren't any relation of Octave Boissy?"

I rather hoped he was; for after all, say what you like, there is a
certain pleasure in feeling that you have been to school with even a
relative of so tremendous a European celebrity as Octave Boissy--the man
who made a million and a half francs with his second play, which was
nevertheless quite a good play. All the walls of Paris were shouting his
name.

"I'm the johnny himself," he replied with timidity, naïvely proud of his
Saxon slang.

I did not give an astounded _No_! An astounded _No_! would have been
rude. Still, my fear is that I failed to conceal entirely my amazement.
I had to fight desperately against the natural human tendency to assume
that no boy with whom one has been to school can have developed into a
great man.

"Really!" I remarked, as calmly as I could, and added a shocking lie:
"Well, I'm not surprised!" And at the same time I could hear myself
saying a few days later at the office of my paper: "I met Octave Boissy
in Paris. Went to school with him, you know."

"You'd forgotten my Christian name, probably," he said.