a distinguished person, and a poet
that did great honor to England.

When he had gone, the Countess Martin asked ingenuously of Paul Vence if
he knew why that good Madame Marmet had looked at M. Schmoll with such
marked though silent anger. He was surprised that she did not know.

"I never know anything," she said.

"But the quarrel between Schmoll and Marmet is famous. It ceased only at
the death of Marmet.

"The day that poor Marmet was buried, snow was falling. We were wet and
frozen to the bones. At the grave, in the wind, in the mud, Schmoll read
under his umbrella a speech full of jovial cruelty and triumphant pity,
which he took afterward to the newspapers in a mourning carriage. An
indiscreet friend let Madame Marmet hear of it, and she fainted. Is it
possible, Madame, that you have not heard of this learned and ferocious
quarrel?

"The Etruscan language was the cause of it. Marmet made it his unique
study. He was surnamed Marmet the Etruscan. Neither he nor any one else
knew a word of that language, the last vestige of which is lost.
Schmoll said continually to Marmet: 'You do not know Etruscan, my dear
colleague; that is the reason why you are an honorable savant and
a fair-minded man.' Piqued by his ironic praise, Marmet thought of
learning a little Etruscan. He read to his colleague a memoir on the
part played by flexions in the idiom of the ancient Tuscans."

Madame Martin asked what a flexion was.

"Oh, Madame, if I explain anything to you, it will mix up everything. Be
content with knowing that in that memoir poor Marmet quoted Latin texts
and quoted them wrong. Schmoll is a Latinist of great learning, and,
after Mommsen, the chief epigraphist of the world.

"He reproached his young colleague--Marmet was not fifty years old--with
reading Etruscan too well and Latin not well enough. From that time
Marmet had no rest. At every meeting he was mocked unmercifully; and,
finally, in spite of his softness, he got angry. Schmoll is without
rancor. It is a virtue of his race. He does not bear ill-will to those
whom he persecutes. One day, as he went up the stairway of the Institute
with Renan and Oppert, he met Marmet, and extended his hand to him.
Marmet refused to take it, and said 'I do not know you.'--'Do you take
me for a Latin inscription?' Schmoll replied. Marmet died and was buried
because of that satire. Now you know the reason why his widow sees his
enemy with horror."

"And I have made them d