ty must have dropped a fat pocket-book,
on purpose for me! I believed in something, then--even in lost
pocket-books. And now, now! I would commit no such follies as
that, but I believe I could be guilty of even worse things,
if crime, common, low, contemptible, shameful crime, were not
forbidden to the son of the Marquis d'Aubremel and Margaret
Malden.

"Oh, great genius!" he went on, taking up the open book near him,
"great philosopher, called a sophist by the ignorant--how deep a
truth you uttered in writing these lines, that I never read
over without a shudder: 'Imagine a Chinese mandarin, living in a
fabulous country three thousand leagues away, whom you have never
seen and shall never see--imagine, moreover, that the death
of this mandarin, this man, almost a myth, would make you a
millionaire, and that you have but to lift your finger, at home,
in France, to bring about his death, without the possibility of
ever being called to account for it by any one; say, what would
you do?'

"That fearful passage must have made many men dream--and does
not Bianchon, that great materialist, so well painted by Balzac,
confess that he has got as far as his thirty-third mandarin? What
a St. Bartholomew of mandarins, if my philosopher's supposition
could grow into a truth!"

Felix ceased his soliloquy, and bent his head to let the storm
raised in his soul by the atheist philosopher pass over. His bad
instincts, aroused, spoke louder at that instant than reason,
louder than reality. His glance fell on the chimney-piece, where
a porcelain figure, the grotesque _chef d'oeuvre_ of some great
Chinese artist, leered at him with its everlasting grin.
The young man smiled. "Perhaps that is the likeness of a
mandarin--bulbous nose, hanging cheeks, moustaches drooping
like plumes, a peaked head, knotty hands--a regular deformity.
Reflecting on the ugliness of that idiotic race, there is much to
be urged by way of excuse for people who kill mandarins."

Some persistent thought evidently haunted Felix's mind. Again he
drove it off, and again it beset him.

"Pshaw!" he exclaimed, after a last brief struggle, "I am alone,
and out of sorts. I will amuse myself with a carnival freak, a
mere theoretic and philosophic piece of nonsense. I have tried
many worse ones. It wants a quarter to twelve. I give myself
fifteen minutes to study my spells. Let me see, what mandarin
shall I murder? I don't know any, and I have no peerage list of
the F