new species of education? Does it not invoke, from the
enlightened solicitude of the ministers of Public Instruction, the
creation of chairs of anthropology,--a science in which Germany
outstrips us? Modern myths are even less understood than ancient ones,
harried as we are with myths. Myths are pressing us from every point;
they serve all theories, they explain all questions. They are,
according to human ideas, the torches of history; they would save
empires from revolution if only the professors of history would force
the explanations they give into the mind of the provincial masses. If
Mademoiselle Cormon had been a reader or a student, and if there had
existed in the department of the Orne a professor of anthropology, or
even had she read Ariosto, the frightful disasters of her conjugal
life would never have occurred. She would probably have known why the
Italian poet makes Angelica prefer Medoro, who was a blond Chevalier
de Valois, to Orlando, whose mare was dead, and who knew no better
than to fly into a passion. Is not Medoro the mythic form for all
courtiers of feminine royalty, and Orlando the myth of disorderly,
furious, and impotent revolutions, which destroy but cannot produce?
We publish, but without assuming any responsibility for it, this
opinion of a pupil of Monsieur Ballanche.

No information has reached us as to the fate of the negroes' heads in
diamonds. You may see Madame du Val-Noble every evening at the Opera.
Thanks to the education given her by the Chevalier de Valois, she has
almost the air of a well-bred woman.

Madame du Bousquier still lives; is not that as much as to say she
still suffers? After reaching the age of sixty--the period at which
women allow themselves to make confessions--she said confidentially to
Madame du Coudrai, that she had never been able to endure the idea of
dying an old maid.

ADDENDUM

The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.

(Note: The Collection of Antiquities is a companion piece to The Old
Maid. In other Addendum appearances they are combined under the title
of The Jealousies of a Country Town.)

Bordin
The Gondreville Mystery
The Seamy Side of History
The Commission in Lunacy

Bousquier, Du (or Du Croisier or Du Bourguier)
The Collection of Antiquities (companion piece)
The Middle Classes

Bousquier, Madame du (du Croisier) (Mlle. Cormon)
The Collection of Antiquities (companion piece)

Casteran, De