le symbols. Monsieur Sariette even went so far as to imagine
that young Maurice, on leaving his club or some nationalist meeting,
might have torn these Jewish volumes from their shelves, out of hatred
for old Jacob and his modern posterity; for this young man of family was
a declared anti-semite, and only consorted with those Jews who were as
anti-semitic as himself. It was giving a very free rein to his
imagination, but Monsieur Sariette's brain could not rest, and went
wandering about among speculations of the wildest extravagance.

Impatient to know the truth, the zealous guardian of the library called
the manservant.

Hippolyte knew nothing. The porter at the lodge could not furnish any
clue. None of the domestics had heard a sound. Monsieur Sariette went
down to the study of Monsieur Rene d'Esparvieu, who received him in
nightcap and dressing-gown, listened to his story with the air of a
serious man bored with idle chatter, and dismissed him with words which
conveyed a cruel implication of pity.

"Do not worry, my good Monsieur Sariette; be sure that the books were
lying where you left them last night."

Monsieur Sariette reiterated his enquiries a score of times, discovered
nothing, and suffered such anxiety that sleep entirely forsook him.
When, on the following day at seven o'clock he entered the room with
the busts and globes, and saw that all was in order, he heaved a sigh of
relief. Then suddenly his heart beat fit to burst. He had just seen
lying flat on the mantelpiece a paper-bound volume, a modern work, the
boxwood paper-knife which had served to cut its pages still thrust
between the leaves. It was a dissertation on the two parallel versions
of Genesis, a work which Monsieur Sariette had relegated to the attic,
and which had never left it up to now, no one in Monsieur d'Esparvieu's
circle having had the curiosity to differentiate between the parts for
which the polytheistic and monotheistic contributors were respectively
responsible in the formation of the first of the sacred books. This book
bore the label R > 3214-VIII/2. And this painful truth was suddenly
borne in upon the mind of Monsieur Sariette: to wit, that the most
scientific system of numbering will not help to find a book if the book
is no longer in its place. Every day of the ensuing month found the
table littered with books. Greek and Latin lay cheek by jowl with
Hebrew. Monsieur Sariette asked himself whether these nocturnal
flittings