gore-stained vestments of three archbishops of Paris murdered within as
many decades.



IV


Thackeray came to Paris when a very young man. He was for painting
pictures, not for writing books, and he retained his artistic yearnings if
not ambitions long after he had become a great and famous man of letters.
It was in Paris that he married his wife, and in Paris that the melancholy
finale came to pass; one of the most heartbreaking chapters in literary
history.

His little girls lived here with their grandparents. The elder of them
relates how she was once taken up some flights of stairs by the Countess X
to the apartment of a frail young man to whom the Countess was carrying a
basket of fruit; and how the frail young man insisted, against the protest
of the Countess, upon sitting at the piano and playing; and of how they
came out again, the eyes of the Countess streaming with tears, and of her
saying, as they drove away, "Never, never forget, my child, as long as
you live, that you have heard Chopin play." It was in one of the lubberly
houses of the Place Vendome that the poet of the keyboard died a few days
later. Just around the corner, in the Rue du Mont Thabor, died Alfred de
Musset. A brass plate marks the house.

May I not here transcribe that verse of the famous "Ballad of
Bouillabaisse," which I have never been able to recite, or read aloud, and
part of which I may at length take to myself: