long as he was confined to his bed there were
no murders. They began again as soon as he was well. On some pretext he
was put in prison, and, just as was expected, so long as he was shut up
the palaces were in security; but the moment he got out (there being no
proof of anything against him) the victims fell just as before. Finally
the rack extracted his secret, and he was executed. A strange thing was
that he had made no use whatever of the stolen property; it was all
found stowed away under the flooring of his room. He said, in the
naivest manner, that he had made a vow to St. Rochus, the patron of his
craft, that he would get together a certain, pretty considerable, sum
by robbery, and then stop; and complained of the hardship of having
been apprehended before the said sum was arrived at."

"I never heard of the Venetian shoemaker," said Sylvester; "but if I am
truly to tell you the source from whence I drew, I must inform you that
the words spoken by Mademoiselle Scuderi, 'Un amant qui craint les
voleurs,' &c., were really made use of by her, in almost similar
circumstances to those of my story. Also the affair of the offering
from the band of robbers is by no means a creature of the brain of the
felicitously inspired writer. The account of that you will find in a
book where you certainly would not look for it, Wagenseil's 'Nuernberg
Chronicle.' The old gentleman speaks of a visit he made to Mademoiselle
Scuderi in Paris, and if I have succeeded in representing her as
charming and delightful, I am indebted solely to the distinguished
_courtoisie_ with which Wagenseil mentions her."

"Verily," said Theodore, laughing, "to stumble upon Mademoiselle
Scuderi in the 'Nuernberg Chronicle' requires an author's lucky hand,
such as Sylvester is specially gifted with. In fact, he shines on us
to-night in his double capacity of playwright and story-teller, like
the constellation of the Dioscuri."

"That is just where he seems to me so vain," said Vincenz. "A man who
writes a good play ought not to set to work to tell a good tale as
well."

"Yet it is strange," said Cyprian, "that authors who can tell a story
well, who manage their characters and situations cleverly, often fail
altogether in drama for the stage."

"But," said Lothair, "are not the conditions of drama and of narrative
so essentially different in their fundamental elements, that the
attempt to turn a story into a play is very often a complete failure?
You u