caping our
notice by their serene audacity. But hardly was the pie--I mean the
magazine--opened when these two birds began to sing. Wasn't
that--interesting? Of course Louis de la Houssaye, who in 1786 "had lately
come from San Domingo," had _not_ "been fighting the insurgents"--who did
not revolt until four or five years afterward! And of course the old
count, who so kindly left the family group that was bidding Madelaine de
Livilier good-bye, was not the Prime Minister Maurepas, who was _not_
"only a few months returned from exile," and who was _not_ then "at the
pinnacle of royal favor"; for these matters were of earlier date, and this
"most lovable old man in the world" wasn't any longer in the world at all,
and had not been for eight years. He was dead and buried.

And so, after all, fraudulent intent or none, _this_ manuscript, just as
it is, could never have been written by Alix. On "this 22d of August,
1795," she could not have perpetrated such statements as these two. Her
memory of persons and events could not have been so grotesquely at fault,
nor could she have hoped so to deceive any one. The misstatements are of
later date, and from some one to whom the two events were historical. But
the manuscript is all in one simple, undisguised, feminine handwriting,
and with no interlineation save only here and there the correction of a
miswritten word.

Now in translating madame's "Voyage de ma Grandmere," I noticed something
equivalent to an interlineation, but in her own writing like all the rest,
and added in a perfectly unconcealed, candid manner, at the end of a
paragraph near the close of the story. It struck me as an innocent gloss
of the copyist, justified in her mind by some well-credited family
tradition. It was this: "Just as we [Francoise and Alix] were parting, she
[Alix] handed me the story of her life." I had already called my friend's
attention to the anachronisms, and she was in keen distress, because
totally unable to account for them. But as I further pondered them, this
gloss gained new significance and I mentioned it. My new inquiry flashed
light upon her aged memory. She explained at once that, to connect the two
stories of Francoise and Alix, she had thought it right to impute these
few words to Francoise rather than for mere exactness to thrust a detailed
explanation of her own into a story hurrying to its close. My question
called back an incident of long ago and resulted first in her rummagi