the appearance of an extraordinary personage at the fetes, concerts,
balls, and routs given by the countess. It was a man. The first time
that he was seen in the house was at a concert, when he seemed to have
been drawn to the salon by Marianina's enchanting voice.

"I have been cold for the last minute or two," said a lady near the
door to her neighbor.

The stranger, who was standing near the speaker, moved away.

"This is very strange! now I am warm," she said, after his departure.
"Perhaps you will call me mad, but I cannot help thinking that my
neighbor, the gentleman in black who just walked away, was the cause
of my feeling cold."

Ere long the exaggeration to which people in society are naturally
inclined, produced a large and growing crop of the most amusing ideas,
the most curious expressions, the most absurd fables concerning this
mysterious individual. Without being precisely a vampire, a ghoul, a
fictitious man, a sort of Faust or Robin des Bois, he partook of the
nature of all these anthropomorphic conceptions, according to those
persons who were addicted to the fantastic. Occasionally some German
would take for realities these ingenious jests of Parisian
evil-speaking. The stranger was simply _an old man_. Some young men,
who were accustomed to decide the future of Europe every morning in a
few fashionable phrases, chose to see in the stranger some great
criminal, the possessor of enormous wealth. Novelists described the old
man's life and gave some really interesting details of the atrocities
committed by him while he was in the service of the Prince of Mysore.
Bankers, men of a more positive nature, devised a specious fable.