I'll never
again have a single play performed in this theatre."

And immediately, under the little door which shuts off the choir on the
right hand side of the altar, showing his friends Racine's epitaph,
which is let into the wall, like a Parisian thoroughly conversant with
the antiquities of his city, he recalled the history of this stone, he
told them how the poet had been buried in accordance with his desire at
Port-Royal-des-Champs, at the foot of Monsieur Hamon's grave, and that,
after the destruction of the abbey and the violation of the tombs, the
body of Messire Jean Racine, the King's secretary, Groom of the Chamber,
had been transferred, all unhonoured; to Saint-Etienne-du-Mont. And he
told how the tombstone, bearing the inscription composed for Boileau,
beneath the knight's crest and the shield with its swan argent, and done
into Latin by Monsieur Dodart, had served as a flagstone in the choir of
the little church of Magny-Lessart; where it had been discovered in
1808.

"There it is," he added. "It was broken in six pieces and the name of
Racine was effaced by the shoes of the peasants. The fragments were
pieced together and the missing letters carved anew."

On this subject he expatiated with his customary vivacity and
diffusiveness, drawing from his prodigious memory a multitude of curious
facts and amusing anecdotes, breathing life into history and endowing
archaeology with a living interest. His admiration and his wrath burst
forth in swift and violent alternation in the solemnity of the church,
and amid the pomp of the ceremony.

"I would give something to know, for instance, who were the stupid
bunglers who set this stone in the wall. _Hic jacet nobilis vir Johannes
Racine._ It is not true! They make honest Boileau's epitaph lie. The
body of Racine is not in this spot. It was laid to rest in the third
chapel on the left, as you enter. What idiots!" Then, suddenly calm, he
pointed to Pascal's tombstone.

"That came here from the museum of the Petits-Augustins. No praise can
be too great for Lenoir, who, in the days of the Revolution, collected
and preserved."

Thereupon, he improvised a second lecture on lapidary archaeology, even
more brilliant than the first, transformed the history of Pascal's life
into a terrible yet amusing drama, and vanished. In all, he had remained
in the church for the space of ten minutes.

Over those heads full of worldly cares and profane desires the _Dies
irae_ ru