French Academy.

"I don't need a translation," said Maurice proudly. "Give me the Prior
de Vendome's copy."

Monsieur Sariette went slowly up to the cupboard in which the jewel in
question was contained. The keys were rattling in his trembling hand. He
raised them to the lock and withdrew them again immediately and
suggested that Maurice should have the common _Lucretius_ published by
Garnier.

"It's very handy," said he with an engaging smile.

But the silence with which this proposal was received made it clear that
resistance was useless. He slowly drew forth the volume from its place,
and having taken the precaution to see that there wasn't a speck of dust
on the table-cloth, he laid it tremblingly thereon before the
great-grandson of Alexandre d'Esparvieu.

Maurice began to turn the leaves, and when he got to page 137 he saw the
stain which had been made with violet ink. It was about the size of a
pea.

"Ay, that's it," said old Sariette, who had his eye on the _Lucretius_
the whole time; "that's the trace those invisible monsters left behind
them."

"What, there were several of them, Monsieur Sariette?" exclaimed
Maurice.

"I cannot tell. But I don't know whether I have a right to have this
blot removed since, like the blot Paul Louis Courier made on the
Florentine manuscript, it constitutes a literary document, so to speak."

Scarcely were the words out of the old fellow's mouth when the front
door bell rang and there was a confused noise of voices and footsteps in
the next room. Sariette ran forward at the sound and collided with Pere
Guinardon's mistress, old Zephyrine, who, with her tousled hair sticking
up like a nest of vipers, her face aflame, her bosom heaving, her
abdominal part like an eiderdown quilt puffed out by a terrific gale,
was choking with grief and rage. And amid sobs and sighs and groans and
all the innumerable sounds which, on earth, make up the mighty uproar to
which the emotions of living beings and the tumult of nature give rise,
she cried:

"He's gone, the monster! He's gone off with her. He's cleared out the
whole shanty and left me to shift for myself with eighteenpence in my
purse."

And she proceeded to give a long and incoherent account of how Michel
Guinardon had abandoned her and gone to live with Octavie, the
bread-woman's daughter, and she let loose a torrent of abuse against the
traitor.

"A man whom I've kept going with my own money for fifty years and more.
Fo