PART ONECHAPTER ICertain streets have an atmosphere of their own, a sort of universal fameand the particular affection of their citizens. One of such streets isthe Cannebière, and the jest: “If Paris had a Cannebière it would be alittle Marseilles” is the jocular expression of municipal pride. I, too,I have been under the spell. For me it has been a street leading intothe unknown.There was a part of it where one could see as many as five big cafés in aresplendent row. That evening I strolled into one of them. It was by nomeans full. It looked deserted, in fact, festal and overlighted, butcheerful. The wonderful street was distinctly cold (it was an evening ofcarnival), I was very idle, and I was feeling a little lonely. So I wentin and sat down.The carnival time was drawing to an end. Everybody, high and low, wasanxious to have the last fling. Companies of masks with linked arms andwhooping like red Indians swept the streets in crazy rushes while gustsof cold mistral swayed the gas lights as far as the eye could reach.There was a touch of bedlam in all this.Perhaps it was that which made me feel lonely, since I was neithermasked, nor disguised, nor yelling, nor in any other way in harmony withthe bedlam element of life. But I was not sad. I was merely in a stateof sobriety. I had just returned from my second West Indies voyage. Myeyes were still full of tropical splendour, my memory of my experiences,lawful and lawless, which had their charm and their thrill; for they hadstartled me a little and had amused me considerably. But they had leftme untouched. Indeed they were other men’s adventures, not mine. Exceptfor a little habit of responsibility which I had acquired they had notmatured me. I was as young as before. Inconceivably young—stillbeautifully unthinking—infinitely receptive.You may believe that I was not thinking of Don Carlos and his fight for akingdom. Why should I? You don’t want to think of things which you meetevery day in the newspapers and in conversation. I had paid some callssince my return and most of my acquaintance were legitimists andintensely interested in the events of the frontier of Spain, forpolitical, religious, or romantic reasons. But I was not interested.Apparently I was not romantic enough. Or was it that I was even moreromantic than all those good people? The affair seemed to mecommonplace. That man was attending to his business of a Pretender.On the front page of the illustrated paper I saw lying on a table nearme, he looked picturesque enough, seated on a boulder, a big strong manwith a square-cut beard, his hands resting on the hilt of a cavalrysabre—and all around him a landscape of savage mountains. He caught myeye on that spiritedly composed woodcut. (There were no inanesnapshot-reproductions in those days.) It was the obvious romance forthe use of royalists but it arrested my attention.Just then some masks from outside invaded the café, dancing hand in handin a single file led by a burly man with a cardboard nose. He gambolledin wildly and behind him twenty others perhaps, mostly Pierrots andPierrettes holding each other by the hand and winding in and out betweenthe chairs and tables: eyes shining in the holes of cardboard faces,breasts panting; but all preserving a mysterious silence.