Once a year, too, this incomparable artist found time to
renew his youth by a sojourn in the simple cottage which saw his
birth, and by embracing the giver of his life. Was it possible
that a man who treated one woman with such devotion and reverence
could take the life of another? He adduced various and picturesque
reasons to show that such an event must be impossible, but the jury
took the opposite view. Some one had to be guillotined, and the
intelligent jury decided that Paris could spare Narcisse better
than it could spare Mademoiselle Sidonie. I fear the fact that he
had deigned to sell his services to a brutal islander may have
helped them to come to this conclusion, but there were other and
more weighty reasons. Of the supreme excellence of Narcisse as an
artist the jury knew nothing, so they let him go hang--or worse--
but of Mademoiselle Sidonie they knew a good deal, and their
knowledge, I believe, is shared by certain English visitors to
Paris. She is one of the attractions of the Fantasies d'Arcadie,
and her latest song, Bonjour Coco, is sung and whistled in every
capital of Europe; so the jury, thrusting aside as mere pedantry
the evidence of facts, set to work to find some verdict which would
not eclipse the gaiety of La Ville Lumiere by cutting short the
career of Mademoiselle Sidonie.
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