{"product_id":"2940013417878","title":"THE ARROW OF GOLD","description":"PART ONE\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCHAPTER I\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCertain streets have an atmosphere of their own, a sort of universal fame\u003cbr\u003eand the particular affection of their citizens.  One of such streets is\u003cbr\u003ethe Cannebière, and the jest: “If Paris had a Cannebière it would be a\u003cbr\u003elittle Marseilles” is the jocular expression of municipal pride.  I, too,\u003cbr\u003eI have been under the spell.  For me it has been a street leading into\u003cbr\u003ethe unknown.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere was a part of it where one could see as many as five big cafés in a\u003cbr\u003eresplendent row.  That evening I strolled into one of them.  It was by no\u003cbr\u003emeans full.  It looked deserted, in fact, festal and overlighted, but\u003cbr\u003echeerful.  The wonderful street was distinctly cold (it was an evening of\u003cbr\u003ecarnival), I was very idle, and I was feeling a little lonely.  So I went\u003cbr\u003ein and sat down.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe carnival time was drawing to an end.  Everybody, high and low, was\u003cbr\u003eanxious to have the last fling.  Companies of masks with linked arms and\u003cbr\u003ewhooping like red Indians swept the streets in crazy rushes while gusts\u003cbr\u003eof cold mistral swayed the gas lights as far as the eye could reach.\u003cbr\u003eThere was a touch of bedlam in all this.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePerhaps it was that which made me feel lonely, since I was neither\u003cbr\u003emasked, nor disguised, nor yelling, nor in any other way in harmony with\u003cbr\u003ethe bedlam element of life.  But I was not sad.  I was merely in a state\u003cbr\u003eof sobriety.  I had just returned from my second West Indies voyage.  My\u003cbr\u003eeyes were still full of tropical splendour, my memory of my experiences,\u003cbr\u003elawful and lawless, which had their charm and their thrill; for they had\u003cbr\u003estartled me a little and had amused me considerably.  But they had left\u003cbr\u003eme untouched.  Indeed they were other men’s adventures, not mine.  Except\u003cbr\u003efor a little habit of responsibility which I had acquired they had not\u003cbr\u003ematured me.  I was as young as before.  Inconceivably young—still\u003cbr\u003ebeautifully unthinking—infinitely receptive.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYou may believe that I was not thinking of Don Carlos and his fight for a\u003cbr\u003ekingdom.  Why should I?  You don’t want to think of things which you meet\u003cbr\u003eevery day in the newspapers and in conversation.  I had paid some calls\u003cbr\u003esince my return and most of my acquaintance were legitimists and\u003cbr\u003eintensely interested in the events of the frontier of Spain, for\u003cbr\u003epolitical, religious, or romantic reasons.  But I was not interested.\u003cbr\u003eApparently I was not romantic enough.  Or was it that I was even more\u003cbr\u003eromantic than all those good people?  The affair seemed to me\u003cbr\u003ecommonplace.  That man was attending to his business of a Pretender.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn the front page of the illustrated paper I saw lying on a table near\u003cbr\u003eme, he looked picturesque enough, seated on a boulder, a big strong man\u003cbr\u003ewith a square-cut beard, his hands resting on the hilt of a cavalry\u003cbr\u003esabre—and all around him a landscape of savage mountains.  He caught my\u003cbr\u003eeye on that spiritedly composed woodcut.  (There were no inane\u003cbr\u003esnapshot-reproductions in those days.)  It was the obvious romance for\u003cbr\u003ethe use of royalists but it arrested my attention.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJust then some masks from outside invaded the café, dancing hand in hand\u003cbr\u003ein a single file led by a burly man with a cardboard nose.  He gambolled\u003cbr\u003ein wildly and behind him twenty others perhaps, mostly Pierrots and\u003cbr\u003ePierrettes holding each other by the hand and winding in and out between\u003cbr\u003ethe chairs and tables: eyes shining in the holes of cardboard faces,\u003cbr\u003ebreasts panting; but all preserving a mysterious silence.","brand":"SAP","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47171316089072,"sku":"2940013417878","price":0.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940013417878_p0.jpg?v=1763581235","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940013417878","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}