Berkley got them and paid. I had reflected that my letter of credit
from Munroe & Co. would undoubtedly be drawn on Baden-Baden, and had
suddenly taken a resolution to try the effect of the springs on my
unfortunate stoutness.

We got down at the Gasthaus zum Hirsch, but I had already sold the
ruins of my chronometer, and was twenty-five francs the richer for the
transaction.

I cannot call Baden-Baden a city: it is a stage. It is a perpetually
set-scene for light opera. Everything seems dressed up and artificial,
and meant to be viewed, as it were, in the glare of the foot-lights.
But instead of the shepherds in white satin who ought to be the
performers in this ingenious theatre, it is the unaccustomed stranger
who is forced into the position of actor. As he toils up the steep and
slovenly streets, faced with shabby buildings that crack and blacken
behind their ill-adjusted fronts of stucco and distemper, he
cheapens rapidly in his own view: he feels painfully like the hapless
supernumerary whom he has seen mounting an obvious step-ladder behind
a screen of rock-work on his way to a wedding in the chapel or a
coronation in the Capitol. The difference is, that here the permission
to play his rôle is paid for by the performer.

But I, as I sat hugging my knee in the hotel bed-room, was possessed
by loftier feelings. If there is one faculty which I can fairly
extol in myself, it is that of displaying true sentiment in false
situations. My thoughts, with incredible agility, went back to
Francine. A knock came at the door, and my emotions received a chill:
my visitor could be none but Berkley, in whose face I should see a
reminder that I owed him for my car-fare.