to examine the mask for themselves before the
exhibition began. It was all very well that they could not discover any
trick, but they were only all the more convinced that they were being
tricked. Did not the people know that they ought to be tricked?

I had recognized a great artist in the old mountebank, and I was quite
sure that he was altogether incapable of any trickery. I told him so,
while expressing my admiration to him; and he had been touched by my
open admiration and above all by the justice I had done him. Thus we
became good friends, and he explained to me, very modestly, the real
trick which the crowd do not understand, the eternal trick contained in
these simple words: "To be gifted by nature and to practice every day
for long, long years."

He had been especially struck by the certainty which I expressed that
any trickery must become impossible to him. "Yes," he said to me;
"quite impossible! Impossible to a degree which you cannot imagine. If
I were to tell you! But where would be the use?"

His face clouded over, and his eyes filled with tears. I did not
venture to force myself into his confidence. My looks, however, were
not so discreet as my silence, and begged him to speak; so he responded
to their mute appeal.

"After all," he said; "why should I not tell you about it? You will
understand me." And he added, with a look of sudden ferocity: "She
understood it, at any rate!"

"Who?" I asked.

"My strumpet of a wife," he replied. "Ah! Monsieur, what an abominable
creature she was--if you only knew! Yes, she understood it too well,
too well, and that is why I hate her so; even more on that account,
than for having deceived me. For that is a natural fault, is it not,
and may be pardoned? But the other thing was a crime, a horrible crime."

The woman, who stood against the wooden target every night with her
arms stretched out and her finger extended, and whom the old mountebank
fitted with gloves and with a halo formed of his knives, which were as
sharp as razors and which he planted close to her, was his wife. She
might have been a woman of forty, and must have been fairly pretty, but
with a perverse prettiness; she had an impudent mouth, a mouth that was
at the same time sensual and bad, with the lower lip too thick for the
thin, dry upper lip.

I had several times noticed that every time he planted a knife in the
board, she uttered a laugh, so low as scarcely to be heard, but which
was very