Cloud on a roan horse, with a great
jingling of his horse's bells and clacking of his short-handled whip. He
stopped at the restaurant and called for a glass of white wine, and
rising in his stirrups, shouted gayly for Monsieur et Madame Grigoux.
They appeared at the first-floor window, looking very happy, and he
drank their health, and they his. I could see Gogo and Mimsey in the
crowd behind them, and mildly wondered again, as I had so often wondered
before, how I came to see it all from the outside--from another point of
view than Gogo's.
Then the courier bowed gallantly, and said, _"Bonne chance!"_ and went
trotting down the Grande Rue on his way to the Tuileries, and the
wedding guests began to sing: they sang a song beginning--
_"Il etait un petit navire, Qui n'avait jamais navigue_...."
I had quite forgotten it, and listened till the end, and thought it very
pretty; and was interested in a dull, mechanical way at discovering
that it must be the original of Thackeray's famous ballad of "Little
Billee," which I did not hear till many years after. When they came to
the last verse--
"_Si cette histoire vous embete, Nous allons la recommencer_,"
I went on my way.
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