JUNE 1895 Paris More than that: my first visit to Paris! Youth and a first visit to Paris! What a host of joyous reminiscences, irrational, but bubbling over with life for life's own sake! Yet, strange though it may seem, my most vivid memory of those days begins with a visit to a cemetery.

The thought of death, and of all that is connected with it, was always near to me, even in my youth. Even in those years I used to find some special, though melancholy, pleasure in visiting churchyards. Now, in my latter years, it is a sort of review of old calling-cards: a relation, an acquaintance, a friendhere and there I read a familiar name on a tablet. In those distant years, however, a visit to a cemetery was, to me, a summary of modern history.

The Montmartre cemetery is not so majestic as Père-Lachaise, but here too many a great figure comes to mindHeine's among others. I wandered about the place without my Baedeker, trusting to luck. A caretaker, evidently in wait for visitors, stepped toward me. 'Would you like to see the grave of La dame aux camélias?'

The grave of La dame aux camélias! And I still a dreaming youth of course I would!

Stepping with a wary and experienced gait among the alleys of that town of the dead, the caretaker led me to a modest, almost neglected grave with a tablet that read: 'Ci-git Alphon

sine Plessis, née . . 1823, morte ... 1846. De Profundis.' (I don't remember the exact dates.) A wreath of white camelias lay under a glass cover. This roused my interest. Whom could it be from? Who brought it here? Who still thought of her, half a century after she was dead and gone?

The caretaker explained, not without an air of importance: 'M. Dumas brings one each year.'

I had always known that Alexandre Dumas took the subject of his novel which he later worked over into a less brilliant but more popular play — from his own life, and yet something in the caretaker's words impressed me. I spoke about it at lunch that day to some friends who belonged to literary and artistic circles. Some of them knew Dumas personally, and one lady asked me if I cared to meet him. It may well be imagined that my answer was yes. A telegram was at once sent to Marlyle-Roi, where Dumas lived in his villa. A favorable answer was received that same evening: the famous writer would expect me the following day at three o'clock.

That 'following day' - I remember it well-was a tedious gray and rainy one. I walked through the mud from the station to the gate of Dumas's villa, then over the slippery gravel of the garden path. A servant took my card. A few minutes' waiting. 'Please, sir, this way!'

Alexandre Dumas met me most amiably at the top of the stairs. A white moustache, which looked as if it had been curled, sparse wavy white hair, a pleasant smile, and not very pleasant light eyes. He was dressed informally, but very elegantly, in the fashion of that day: a velvet housejacket and lacquered shoes.

'Charmé, Monsieur .' and SO forth.

We stepped into his study, of whose furnishings I remember clearly only one large rug on the wall-blue, with Bourbon lilies, probably a valuable Gobelin.

The conversation naturally turned on Russia, and I felt at once that Dumas did not care for Russians as a race, although his first wife, Naryshkina, had been one. The explanation of this antipathy was very simple, as I soon found out when I asked him whether he had ever been in Russia or hoped to go there.

'Go to Russia? No, I'm too old now for such long journeys. My father used to visit Russia."

I remembered the overfamous 'shady kliukva' and the other nonsense ascribed to Dumas père, although in reality he had never written it.

'Once, however, I reached the Russian frontier, but never got any farther.' And in a tone of bewitchingly graceful causerie Dumas told me the story of his desperate attempt to penetrate into Russia in pursuit of a woman with whom he became deeply fascinated - not a banal story, though somewhat in the cheap-newspaper spirit, and one that would be admirably fitted to-day for a 'kino-romance,' that last word of modern literature.

'I do not regret the event, however,' he concluded, 'for it was there, in that little frontier town, that I wrote the first chapters of one of my novels, which I based on the incident.'

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Some years afterward I talked with Armand Silvestre, the poet, who explained to me that the novel, La dame aux perles, was the one based on the episode with the Russian lady. He even told me the name of the prototype, which naturally I find impossible to mention.

From La dame aux perles the conversation quite naturally shifted to La dame aux camélias, and strange as it seems- Dumas no longer spoke in the tone of an amiable, jocular, drawing-room conversation. With a touch of dreamy melancholy in his voice, which contradicted his outward appearance and even his inward self, as far as I could guess it from the preceding conversation,

preceding conversation, - Dumas told me some memories of his first youthful passion.

It seems that Jules Janecq, in his preface to La dame aux camélias, has drawn a very true portrait of the 'Duchess Marie du Plessis,' the assumed name under which Alphonsine Plessis, during her short lifetime, charmed all Paris with her elegance and her noble spirit.

'Elle était si bonne, si douce, si distinguée,' said Dumas, pointing to a large portrait - I fail to remember now whether it was an oil painting or a pastel of the woman whom he made famous and who made him famous.

The sad story of La dame aux camélias — not as it is in the play but as it was originally told in the novel was taken entirely from the life of Alexandre Dumas fils. Armand Duval is Alexandre Dumas.

'I gave my hero the initials of my own name, but I did not want to emphasize the identity any more, and therefore I deprived Armand of personality. He is the weakest-drawn character in the novel.'

This, however, was not true, for Armand Duval is a very vivid character

study. Probably Alexandre Dumas, speaking of the 'weakest' character in the novel, was somewhat affected.

"The only detail — although, it seems, an important one-that is not true to life,' he said, 'is the camelias.'

As he said this, Dumas smiled his only smile during his story of La dame aux camélias.

"The camelia was the flower she most disliked, because of its lack of fragrance. When, still under the impression of the emotions that she stirred, I wrote the novel, I employed this detail for some reason or other, but turned it quite around. It really. should have been something more characteristic."

He added after a short silence: 'In this portrait she has a camelia pinned to her corsage. The portrait was painted while she was still living, but the flower was added later, when Alphonsine Plessis, after her death, had become Marguerite Gautier, and Alexandre Dumas Armand Duval.'

Here our talk was interrupted. A friend of Dumas, a well-known surgeon, - if I am not mistaken his name was Reyer,

came in unannounced, and a general conversation began. One of the fashionable topics of the day was the marriage of a world-famous singer with a French countess who before her marriage bore an ancient aristocratic name. For some reason or other later I heard that Dumas himself was not quite indifferent to the countess in question he energetically objected to the marriage. A curious sentence of his stayed in my memory: 'Un aristocrate peut épouser une cabotine, mais une aristocrate ne peut pas épouser un cabotin.' (A man of the aristocracy may marry an actress, but a woman of the aristocracy should not marry an actor.)

Then, too, I remember literatim his

interesting appreciation of philosophy in general, which he expressed after his friend had warmly eulogized some contemporary philosopher.

'Generally speaking,' Dumas said, crossing his legs and leaning back comfortably, 'all philosophy is fiddlesticks.'

Naturally such an opinion produced emphatic objections. May I be forgiven, for reproducing it, by the spirit of the only human philosopher I knew - Vladimir Sergeevich Soloviev!

Dumas, however, insisted on illustrating his paradoxical statement with an anecdote:

'I used to be on very friendly terms with a famous philosopher.' (He gave a name which I, unfortunately, do not remember.) 'When my friend was on his deathbed he said: "Nous étions deux à comprendre la philosophie, le bon Dieu et moi. Maintenant il ne restera le bon Dieu." (There were two of us who really understood philosophy: the Lord and I. Now there is only the Lord.)'

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The surgeon and I laughed, and Dumas added with comic earnestness: 'Et il compromettait Dieu en disant cela! (And he compromised the Lord when he said it!)'

This was my first, and unfortunately my last, meeting with Dumas. As I took leave of him, he very amiably presented me with a copy of his L'Ami des femmes, which at that time was being performed at the Comédie Française. I run the risk of being quite out of date if I recall here his inscription banal, yet dear to me on the inside cover: 'Souvenir affectueux de l'auteur.' The book remained in Petrograd, in my library, and L'Ami des femmes is now in possession of the ennemis des hommes who will appreciate neither the fascinating humor of the book nor my own love of things past.

We talk much nowadays about growing old — about the how, when, and why of a phenomenon that everyone recognizes in theory and as affecting other people, and overlooks as applying to himself. This is particularly true of women. Are there to-day any old women? Mark, I do not say elderly ladies. I mean grandmothers such as we see in picture books, with lace caps on their thin white hair, and gowns that are eternally in style because they transcend all passing fashions. Do we ever see these dear old ladies, with their self-effacing, kindly smiles, in modern society? I look around me and I see only ladies who have married daughters and grandchildren, but none who fits the traditional idea of 'old.'

But I have personally decided that when my time comes I will be an undisguised and self-confessed old lady. For since I visited Cherepich Cloister and called on its venerable monk, more than a century old, I know that age has its beauty an inner beauty, a physical reflection of that joy of the spirit that we call bliss.

We were making a little excursion from Sofia. The Austrian attaché and his pretty young wife, the mayor of the city, and a few other dignitaries were putting themselves out to show honor to our Viennese party returning from Constantinople. We took the Bulgarian Central Railway, which runs from Sofia through Plevna, Schumla, and Varna, to a destination which was strange to me, but lay somewhere beyond in the unknown landscape. On

the right and left extended flat, fertile farmlands, endless fields and meadows, whose shimmering surface rippled in the summer wind. Every vista from the car window was submerged in a sea of green stalks and golden ears, interrupted at rare intervals by a low gabled cottage, a ruminating cow, or a little company of goats and thickwooled sheep grazing together in tolerant comradeship.

Little by little the scenery began to change. Hills rose from the plain in gentle, billowy contours that gradually grew loftier and more impressive. Red sandstone cliffs, broken by deep valleys and verdure-embowered cañons, interrupted our line of vision. Presently we came to where the Iskr River breaks through an old volcanic formation between imposing cliffs of diorite and porphyry. The Balkans — with their stern, slightly melancholy, dreamily savage beauty!

Suddenly the train stopped. A station? No, merely a little unimposing siding where a narrow road wound through the neighboring meadow to a great cloister straggling over emerald fields. The group of ancient buildings resembled an aged beggar kneeling in mute reverence before the table of his master, so humbly did its gray and weathered structures seem to bow before the stone altar of the silent Balkans. I can no longer recall the architectural details; I only remember venerable gray walls, monastic simplicity, and wonderful, profound peace brooding over everything.

It was not always thus. Old chronicles tell of bloody conspiracies, whose threads once centred in this seat of seclusion and repose, of Bulgarian revolts hatched here, of burnings and massacres and Turkish cruelties. But the old cloister always rose again like a phoenix from its ashes, triumphing over error and transitory vicissitudes. Now it harbored a miracle in its bosom a miracle so rare that it recalled the legends of the Bible. This miracle of Cherepich Cloister was its aged monk.

That venerable old man, at the time I saw him, was one hundred and fifteen years old. If you asked him his age he would say about a hundred. He did not care or was not able to give his tale of years more precisely. For him one day was like another. His brother monks kept the record in his place, and it was well known in the whole vicinity.

Pious pilgrims came from the neighborhood and even from remote regions to beg the old man's blessing, for these good people believed that one so rarely favored by fate must be of the elect, specially chosen of God.

I had, I must confess, keen curiosity to see what this centenarian would look like. A fossil? An alruna? A mummy? In truth, none of these.

We were conducted to a little chamber on the first floor, modestly - almost meagrely furnished, in the middle of which the old monk sat in a rude, peasant's chair. He wore a wrinkled black cloak of his order, and on his head a high, dark, priestly cap. His hands lay quietly in his lap. People were standing or kneeling around him, speaking to him or stroking his withered fingers with timid, reverent, caressing gestures.

The old monk sat motionless. His face was serious and placid, like the surface of a quiet, dreaming, woodland

lake. The experiences of a long, long human life were engraved in the deep wrinkles that furrowed his high, broad forehead and twinkled around his smiling mouth. He answered questions in a low, kindly, calm voice. The dignity of his marvelous age and the reverent awe of his visitors made the barren cell seem like a chapel.

'Marvelous,' whispered someone, half aloud. 'He would not be taken to be more than seventy or at the most eighty.' The speaker did not stop to think how small a fraction a decade more or less adds to an age like this. Another visitor observed: 'Apparently after a person passes ninety his appearance changes very little.'

I pondered silently to myself that possibly after ninety we reach an age where the burdens of life cease to be felt. In any case, the old monk looked as if there was not an inch left on the brownish-yellow parchment of his face to record further runes of fate. It seemed as if his soul was asleep with open eyes staring into dreamland.

Since the aged monk in his quiet self-communion was not a very sensational figure, most of his visitors soon left, after receiving his formal blessing. They departed down the corridor, talking in subdued voices, to visit the other things of interest in the cloister, or to spend the beautiful afternoon in the open air.

Thus I suddenly discovered that I was alone with the old monk in his almost unfurnished, whitewashed chamber. He seemed hardly conscious of those about him no more aware of them than is a boulder on the beach aware of the playful wavelets that lap its feet.

Now, however, he opened wide his big dark eyes and contemplated me with a clear, calm gaze. Accustomed as he was to being questioned by old and young alike, he was evidently sur