t down to her own room, Brigitte and the old serving-man half
carrying her between them. The housekeeper set her mistress in a chair,
and broke out:

"What, madame! is that man to sleep in Monsieur Auguste's bed, and wear
Monsieur Auguste's slippers, and eat the pasty that I made for Monsieur
Auguste? Why, if they were to guillotine me for it, I--"

"Brigitte!" cried Mme. de Dey.

Brigitte said no more.

"Hold your tongue, chatterbox," said her husband, in a low voice; "do
you want to kill madame?"

A sound came from the conscript's room as he drew his chair to the
table.

"I shall not stay here," cried Mme. de Dey; "I shall go into the
conservatory; I shall hear better there if anyone passes in the night."

She still wavered between the fear that she had lost her son and the
hope of seeing him once more. That night was hideously silent. Once,
for the Countess, there was an awful interval, when the battalion of
conscripts entered the town, and the men went by, one by one, to their
lodgings. Every footfall, every sound in the street, raised hopes to be
disappointed; but it was not for long, the dreadful quiet succeeded
again. Toward morning the Countess was forced to return to her room.
Brigitte, ever keeping watch over her mistress's movements, did not see
her come out again; and when she went, she found the Countess lying
there dead.

"I expect she heard that conscript," cried Brigitte, "walking about
Monsieur Auguste's room, whistling that accursed _Marseillaise_ of
theirs while he dressed, as if he had been in a stable! That must have
killed her."

But it was a deeper and a more solemn emotion, and doubtless some
dreadful vision, that had caused Mme. de Dey's death; for at the very
hour when she died at Carentan, her son was shot in le Morbihan.

* * * * *

This tragical story may be added to all the instances on record of the
workings of sympathies uncontrolled by the laws of time and space.
These observations, collected with scientific curiosity by a few
isolated individuals, will one day serve as documents on which to base
the foundations of a new science which hitherto has lacked its man of
genius.

_Introduction to Zadig the Babylonian_

_A work (says the author) which performs more than it promises._

Voltaire never heard of a "detective story"; and yet he wrote the first
in modern literature, so clever as to be a model for all the others
that follow