But some woman got hold of the story, and there was a scandalous article in one of the papers in America. Twelve days after it appeared my friend was in Paris and, coming to my rooms, asked me to meet him at a certain hour as he was going to shoot a Frenchman. He asked me to be one of his seconds and I carried his challenge to the marquis. The nobleman was a mere boy and pleaded that he was too nearsighted to use pistols, and, as my friend did not know the use of swords, the duel came to nothing. I did not know enough to ask for a Jury of Honor or he would have been forced to go on the field. One very characteristically French thing came out of the affair, however, when the marquis tried to pooh-pooh my overtures for a fight on the basis that no “actress” could be insulted in his country and that it was only because we were Americans that he would consider the matter at all.
We sometimes went to the Closerie des Lilas, at the corner of the Boulevard St.-Martin. This was quite in the country, in the days of Henri Quatre—a sort of road house where the young bloods went to drink. The women of the court discovered this and used to go out there, disguised as milkmaids, and flirt outrageously with the tipsy members of the nobility. Alas! the lilacs are gone now and sportive milkmaids no longer frequent the place; but the Cafe des Lilas still has its stories, and in my day there was at least one interesting habitué. He was a major whom everybody knew and spoke to familiarly. He was gray bearded and must have had his title from the Franco-Prussian War. He and his cronies had the same table, played piquet, and sat for hours over their coffee. His was a _mazagran_. The first time I saw him I noticed he had a funny trick which he repeated every night. For a _mazagran_ the waiter leaves three lumps of sugar; he always used two, left the other in his saucer, and became exceedingly annoyed if, by any chance, it got wet. In his right-hand waistcoat pocket was his watch, with a great fob that went across. With the utmost deliberation, he would reach into the left-hand pocket, take out a piece of brown paper, beautifully cut into a square, and fold into it the extra lump of sugar, carefully putting the package back in his pocket again. For many nights I watched this proceeding and made up my mind that, being a thrifty Frenchman, he used it for his morning coffee. But not so. Some time after, I read in the Figaro that Major P—— who lived in Montparnasse (there was no mistaking the name and place), had died suddenly, leaving no estate and no personal effects; but behind the door of his small bedroom had been found—a cubic yard of sugar!
