DISAPPOINTMENT
It was Paul Mayol, the inimitable low comedian of the Scala, who started the ball rolling, as far as Paris was concerned.
Perhaps he had the original tip from the desk clerk of the Hotel Saint James, where Prince Pavel Narodkine had put up temporarily; perhaps he had it from his mistress, who had it from her sister, the laundress of the hotel, who, in her turn, had it from the prince's Italian courier; perhaps, even, he had brought it back from the green-rooms of Moscow, where he had filled a triumphant engagement the season before, and whence Narodkine had recently arrived.
At all events, it was Paul Mayol who was first to sense the tang of mystery which clung to the big, melancholy Russian, and who—since in Paris it is the stage, and not, as in New York, the yellow press which does the scavenger work for society—included him among the characters whom he impersonated and satirized in the new Scala Revue.
43
