How magnetic, intense, and vivid are these memories of youth. With what strange, almost unnatural clearness do I see and hear,--see the white face of that _café_, the white nose of that block of houses, stretching up to the Place, between two streets. I can see down the incline of those two streets, and I know what shops are there; I can hear the glass-door of the _café_ grate on the sand as I open it. I can recall the smell of every hour. In the morning that of eggs frizzling in butter, the pungent cigarette, coffee and bad cognac; at five o'clock the fragrant odour of absinthe; and soon after the steaming soup ascends from the kitchen; and as the evening advances, the mingled smells of cigarettes, coffee, and weak beer. A partition, rising a few feet or more over the hats, separates the glass front from the main body of the _café_. The usual marble tables are there, and it is there we sat and aestheticised till two o'clock in the morning. But who is that man? he whose prominent eyes flash with excitement. That is Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. The last or the supposed last of the great family. He is telling that girl a story--that fair girl with heavy eyelids, stupid and sensual. She is, however, genuinely astonished and interested, and he is striving to play upon her ignorance. Listen to him. "Spain--the night is fragrant with the sea and the perfume of the orange trees, you know--a midnight of stars and dreams. Now and then the silence is broken by the sentries challenging--that is all. But not in Spanish but in French are the challenges given; the town is in the hands of the French; it is under martial law. But now an officer passes down a certain garden, a Spaniard disguised as a French officer; from the balcony the family--one of the most noble and oldest families Spain can boast of, a thousand years, long before the conquest of the Moors--watches him. Well then"--Villiers sweeps with a white feminine hand the long hair that is falling over his face--he has half forgotten, he is a little mixed in the opening of the story, and he is striving in English to "scamp," in French to _escamoter_. "The family are watching, death if he is caught, if he fails to kill the French sentry. The cry of a bird, some vague sound attracts the sentry, he turns; all is lost. The Spaniard is seized. Martial law, Spanish conspiracy must be put down. The French general is a man of iron." (Villiers laughs, a short hesitating laugh that is characteristic of him, and continues in his abrupt, uncertain way), "man of iron; not only he declares that the spy must be beheaded, but also the entire family--a man of iron that, ha, ha; and then, no you cannot, it is impossible for you to understand the enormity of the calamity--a thousand years before the conquest by the Moors, a Spaniard alone could--there is no one here, ha, ha, I was forgetting--the utter extinction of a great family of the name, the oldest and noblest of all the families in Spain, it is not easy to understand that, no, not easy here in the 'Nouvelle Athènes'--ha, ha, one must belong to a great family to understand, ha, ha.