bition had led a notary's clerk to aspire. In
short, the second clerk in the office of Maitre Crottat, notary, had
fallen in love with her, as youth at two and twenty can fall in love.
The scrivener would have murdered the Pope and run amuck through the
whole sacred college to procure the miserable sum of a hundred louis to
pay for a shawl which had turned Euphrasia's head, at which price her
waiting woman had promised that Euphrasia should be his. The infatuated
youth walked to and fro under Madame Euphrasia's windows, like the
polar bears in their cage at the Jardin des Plantes, with his right
hand thrust beneath his waistcoat in the region of the heart, which he
was fit to tear from his bosom, but as yet he had only wrenched at the
elastic of his braces.

"What can one do to raise ten thousand francs?" he asked himself.
"Shall I make off with the money that I must pay on the registration of
that conveyance? Good heavens! my loan would not ruin the purchaser, a
man with seven millions! And then next day I would fling myself at his
feet and say, 'I have taken ten thousand francs belonging to you, sir;
I am twenty-two years of age, and I am in love with Euphrasia--that is
my story. My father is rich, he will pay you back; do not ruin me! Have
not you yourself been twenty-two years old and madly in love?' But
these beggarly landowners have no souls! He would be quite likely to
give me up to the public prosecutor, instead of taking pity upon me.
Good God! if it were only possible to sell your soul to the Devil! But
there is neither a God nor a Devil; it is all nonsense out of nursery
tales and old wives' talk. What shall I do?"

"If you have a mind to sell your soul to the Devil, sir," said the
house painter, who had overheard something that the clerk let fall,
"you can have the ten thousand francs."

"And Euphrasia!" cried the clerk, as he struck a bargain with the devil
that inhabited the house painter.

The pact concluded, the frantic clerk went to find the shawl, and
mounted Madame Euphrasia's staircase; and as (literally) the devil was
in him, he did not come down for twelve days, drowning the thought of
hell and of his privileges in twelve days of love and riot and
forgetfulness, for which he had bartered away all his hopes of a
paradise to come.

And in this way the secret of the vast power discovered and acquired by
the Irishman, the offspring of Maturin's brain, was lost to mankind;
and the various Oriental