"Well, child," said the Chevalier, "tell me your adventures
little or big."

The Chevalier's fatherly benignity with these grisettes
would have marked him out anywhere between Paris and
Pekin. The girls put him in mind of the courtesans of an-
other age, of the illustrious queens of opera of European
fame during a good third of the eighteenth century. Certain
it is that he who had lived for so long in a world of women
now as dead and forgotten as the Jesuits, the buccaneers, the
abbes, and the farmers-general, and all great things generally
— certain it is that the Chevalier had acquired an irresistible
good humor, a gracious ease, an unconcern, with no trace of
egoism discernible in it. So might Jupiter have appeared
to Alcmena — a king that chooses to be a woman's dupe, and
flings majesty and its thunderbolts to the winds, that he may
squander Olympus in follies, and "little suppers," and
feminine extravagance; wishful, of all things, to be far
enough away from Juno.
