98 THE STORY OF THE KHEDIVATE.

schemes ; the holders of unappreciated patents ; the jackals of finance, ready to negotiate loans for any amount with principals, whose names they were not prepared to disclose; the applicants for concessions ; the professional gamblers ; the purveyors of all kinds of entertainments ; the dramatic agents ; the soldiers of fortune ; the parasites of civilization ; the social outcasts of all parts of the world — seemed by some common instinct to have made Cairo their trysting-place. This motley society of cosmopolitan adventurers found a ready welcome at the Khedivial Court during the days of its impending downfall.

Drowning men are prone, as we all know, to catch at straws, and in the plight in which Ismail was placed, any adventurer of the Casanova type who held out hopes, however illusory, of any wild project by which his fortunes might be retrieved, was certain of an effusive welcome. Moreover, there was a fibre in Ismail Pasha's character which responded to men who lived upon their wits at the expense of others. When he was taken during one of his visits to Paris to see the Bourse, and had had explained to him the methods by which speculative fortunes are made and lost on the Stock Exchange, he is recorded to have remarked, " St je tCetais pas Khedive je vondrais etre Agent de Changed He was far too shrewd not to see that the great majority of the adventurers who clustered about his court were living, or trying to live, at his cost, and were, as a rule, fooling him. But somehow their fertility of imagination, their want