did not insist; but fifteen days
later, a ministerial decree, with no other legal procedure, assigned
me to one of the most insignificant and remote Lycees of France, at
Mont-de-Marsan.

"Realize my exasperation and you will excuse the excesses to which I
delivered myself in that strange country. What is there to do in
Landes, if you neither eat nor drink? I did both violently. My pay
melted away in _fois gras_, in woodcocks, in fine wines. The result
came quickly enough: in less than a year my joints began to crack like
the over-oiled axle of a bicycle that has gone a long way upon a dusty
track. A sharp attack of gout nailed me to my bed. Fortunately, in
that blessed country, the cure is in reach of the suffering. So I
departed to Dax, at vacation time, to try the waters.

"I rented a room on the bank of the Adour, overlooking the _Promenade
des Baignots_. A charwoman took care of it for me. She worked also for
an old gentleman, a retired Examining Magistrate, President of the
Roger-Ducos Society, which was a vague scientific backwater, in which
the scholars of the neighborhood applied themselves with prodigious
incompetence to the most whimsical subjects. One afternoon I stayed in
my room on account of a very heavy rain. The good woman was
energetically polishing the copper latch of my door. She used a paste
called Tripoli, which she spread upon a paper and rubbed and
rubbed.... The peculiar appearance of the paper made me curious. I
glanced at it. 'Great heavens! Where did you get this paper?' She was
perturbed. 'At my master's; he has lots of it. I tore this out of a
notebook.' 'Here are ten francs. Go and get me the notebook.'

"A quarter of an hour later, she was back with it. By good luck it
lacked only one page, the one with which she had been polishing my
door. This manuscript, this notebook, have you any idea what it was?
Merely the _Voyage to Atlantis_ of the mythologist Denis de Milet,
which is mentioned by Diodorus and the loss of which I had so often
heard Berlioux deplore.[10]

[Footnote 10: How did the _Voyage to Atlantis_ arrive at Dax? I have
found, so far, only one credible hypothesis: it might have been
discovered in Africa by the traveller, de Behagle, a member of the
Roger-Ducos Society, who studied at the college of Dax, and later, on
several occasions, visited the town. (Note by M. Leroux.)]

"This inestimable document contained numerous quotations from the
Critias. It gave an abstract of