leading a child. It was Madame Forestier, still young,
still beautiful, still charming.

Madame Loisel felt moved. Should she speak to her? Yes, certainly. And
now that she had paid, she would tell her all about it. Why not?

She went up.

"Good-day, Jeanne."

The other, astonished to be familiarly addressed by this plain
good-wife, did not recognize her at all and stammered:

"But--madame!--I do not know--You must have mistaken."

"No. I am Mathilde Loisel."

Her friend uttered a cry.

"Oh, my poor Mathilde! How you are changed!"

"Yes, I have had a pretty hard life, since I last saw you, and great
poverty--and that because of you!"

"Of me! How so?"

"Do you remember that diamond necklace you lent me to wear at the
ministerial ball?"

"Yes. Well?"

"Well, I lost it."

"What do you mean? You brought it back."

"I brought you back another exactly like it. And it has taken us ten
years to pay for it. You can understand that it was not easy for us, for
us who had nothing. At last it is ended, and I am very glad."

Madame Forestier had stopped.

"You say that you bought a necklace of diamonds to replace mine?"

"Yes. You never noticed it, then! They were very similar."

And she smiled with a joy that was at once proud and ingenuous.

Madame Forestier, deeply moved, took her hands.

"Oh, my poor Mathilde! Why, my necklace was paste! It was worth at most
only five hundred francs!"

THE MARQUIS DE FUMEROL

Roger de Tourneville was whiffing a cigar and blowing out small clouds
of smoke every now and then, as he sat astride a chair amid a party of
friends. He was talking.

"We were at dinner when a letter was brought in which my father opened.
You know my father, who thinks that he is king of France ad interim.
I call him Don Quixote, because for twelve years he has been running a
tilt against the windmill of the Republic, without quite knowing whether
it was in the cause of the Bourbons or the Orleanists. At present he is
bearing the lance in the cause of the Orleanists alone, because there is
no one else left. In any case, he thinks himself the first gentleman of
France, the best known, the most influential, the head of the party;
and as he is an irremovable senator, he thinks that the thrones of the
neighboring kings are very insecure.

"As for my mother, she is my father's soul, she is the soul of the
kingdom and of religion, and the scourge of all evil-thinkers.

"Well, a letter was