They turned out to be embassy messengers, and they came from the British, the German, the Russian, the Hungarian, the Italian, the Mexican, and the Peruvian embassies. Each man carried a letter addressed to me. I accepted the letters and opened them on the spot. All of them said roughly the same thing: They wanted more pills. They begged for more pills. They instructed me to give the pills to the bearer of the letter, etc. etc.
I told the messengers to wait on the street and I went back up to my room. Then, I wrote the following message on each of the letters: Honoured Sir, these pills are extremely expensive to manufacture. I regret that in future the cost of each pill will be one thousand francs. In those days there were twenty francs to the pound, which meant that I was asking exactly fifty pounds sterling per pill. And fifty pounds sterling in 1912 was worth maybe ten times as much as it is today. By today’s standards, I was probably asking about five hundred pounds per pill. It was a ridiculous price, but these were wealthy men. They were also sex-crazy men, and as any sensible woman will tell you, a man who is very wealthy and grossly sex-crazy both at the same time is the easiest touch in the world. I trotted downstairs again and handed the letters back to their respective carriers and told them to deliver them to their masters. As I was doing this, two more messengers arrived, one from the Quai d’Orsay (the foreign minister) and one from the general at the Ministry of War or whatever it is called. And while I was scribbling the same statement about the price on these last two letters, who should turn up in a very fine hansom cab but Mr. Mitsouko himself. His appearance shocked me. The previous night he had been a bouncy, dapper, bright-eyed little Jap. This morning he hardly had the strength to get out of his cab, and as he came tottering toward me, his legs began to buckle. I grabbed hold of him just in time.
“My dear sir!” he gasped, putting both hands on my shoulders for support. “My dear, dear sir! It’s a miracle! It’s a wonder pill! It’s . . . it’s the greatest invention of all time!”
“Hang on,” I said. “Are you feeling all right?”
“Of course I am all right,” he gasped. “I am a little bit jiggered, that’s all.” He started to giggle, and there he stood, this tiny Oriental person dressed in a top-hat and tails, clinging to my shoulders and giggling quite uncontrollably now. He was so small that the top of his top-hat came no higher than my lowest rib. “I am a little bit jiggered and a little bit pokered,” he said, “but who would not be, my dear boy, who would not be?”
“What happened, sir?” I asked him.
“I molested seven women!” he cried. “And these were not our dinky-tinky little Japanese women! No, no, no! They were enormous strong French wenchies! I took them in rotation, bang bang bang! And every one of them was screaming out camarade camarade camarade! I was a giant among these women, do you understand that, my dear young sir? I was a giant and I swung my giant club and I sent them all squiggling in every direction!”
I led him inside and sat him down in Madame Boisvain’s parlour. I found him a glass of brandy. He gulped it down and a faint yellowish colour began returning to his white cheeks. I noticed that there was a leather satchel suspended by a cord around his right wrist, and when he took it off and dumped it on the table, there was the clinking of coins inside it.
“You must be careful, sir,” I said to him. “You are a small man and these are large pills. I think it would be safer if you took only half the normal dose each time. Just half a pill instead of one.”
“Bunkum, sir!” he cried. “Bunkum and horseradish sauce, as we say in Japan! Tonight I propose to take not one pill but three!”