Volume VII - Modernist Magazines Project

34 The Queen s Pleasurepas to the latest hero of the Beaux-Arts, or bully from the Schoolof Medicine, even though the hero were the son of a villageapothecary, and the bully reeked to heaven of absinthe and tobacco; while the Prime Minister of England would find hisname, it is more than to be feared, unknown, and himself regardedas a person of quite extraordinary unimportance.So we accepted Prince Theodore Pavelovitch, and tried him byhis individual merits, for all the world as if he were made of thesame flesh and blood as Tom, Dick, and Harry ; and thee-andthou'dhim, and hailed him as mon vieux^ as merrily as we dideverybody else. Indeed, I shouldn't wonder if the majority ofthose who knew him were serenely unaware that his origin wasroyal (he would have been the last to apprise them of it), androughly classed him with our other princes valaques. For conveniencesake, we lumped them all—the divers natives of thelands between the Black Sea and the Adriatic—under the genericname, Valaques ; we couldn't be bothered with nicer ethnologicaldistinctions.We tried Prince Theodore by his individual merits; but, as hisindividual merits happened to be signal, we liked him very much.He hadn't a trace of " side ; " his pockets were full of money ; hewas exceedingly free-handed. No man was readier for a lark,none more inventive or untiring in the prosecution of one. Hewas a brilliant scholar, besides, and almost the best fencer in theQuarter. And he was pleasantly good-looking—fair-haired, blueeyed,with a friendly humorous face, a pointed beard, and aslight, agile, graceful figure. Everybody liked him, and everybodywas sorry when he had to leave us, and return to his ultramundanebirthplace. "It can't be helped," he said. "I mustgo home and do three years of military service. But then I shallcome back. I mean always to live in Paris."That