he
did so, thinking, "_Mon Dieu_, how beautiful she is, and what a lucky
rascal is this Pole!"

When she had ended, there was a moment's pause, during which she left
him to his reflections. As he maintained an ominous silence, she grew
impatient. "Speak," she exclaimed. "I wish to know your innermost
thoughts."

"I think you are adorable."

"Oh! please, do for once be serious."

"Seriously," he rejoined, "I am not certain that you are wrong, nor has
it been proved to me that you are right; there remain some doubts."

She cried out eagerly: "According to this, the sole realities of this
world are things that can be seen, touched, felt--a retort and its
contents. Beyond this all is null and void, a lie, a cheat. Ah! your
wretched retorts and crucibles! If I followed out this thought, I should
be ready to break every one of them."

She cast about her as she spoke so ferocious and threatening a
look, that M. Moriaz trembled for his laboratory, "I beg of you," he
protested, "have mercy on my poor crucibles, my honest retorts, my
innocent jars! They have nothing to do with this affair. Is it their
fault that the stories you narrate to me so disturb my usual train of
thoughts that I find it wholly impossible to make adroit replies?"

"You do not, then, believe in the extraordinary?"

"The extraordinary! Every time I encounter it, I salute it," replied he,
drawing off his cap and bowing low; "but at the same time I demand its
papers."

"Ah! there we are. I really imagined that the investigation had been
made."

"It was not conclusive, since it failed to convince Mme. de Lorcy."

"Ah! who could convince Mme. de Lorcy? Do you forget how people of the
world are constituted, and how they detest all that astonishes, all
that exceeds their limits, all that they cannot weight with their small
balances, measure with their tiny compasses?"

"_Peste!_ you are severe on the world; I always fancied that you were
fond of it."

"I do not know whether I am fond of it or not; it is certain that
I scarcely should know how to live without it; but I surely may be
permitted to pass an opinion on it, and I often tell myself that
if Christ should reappear among us with his train of publicans and
fisherman--are you listening?--that if the meek and the lowly Jesus
should come to preach his Sermon on the Mount in the Boulevard des
Italiens--"

"To make a show of probability," he interrupted, "suppose you were
to place the scene at