ABSTRACT

During the next day or two Vansittart fully lived up to his reputation. Never had there been such a golden harvest for the gleaners of the Paris streets. If a workman raised his cap to him he threw him a Napoleon. "Frenchmen have been polite for centuries," he explained, and got nothing by it. He did several extraordinary things. Once he saw in the Avenue de la Bourdonnais an ouvrier and his wife gazing longingly at the windows of one of those cheap eating houses with which the street abounds. He stopped to inquire, and found that the poor man could not afford dinner and could get no work. Vansittart immediately bought him the restaurant and left the new landlord engaged on a tremendous meal which threatened to clear the menu. These things made him popular. He was dogged by reporters, and a fabulous history grew around him.