d been revealed to Christian Penguinia's;
for these things, being hidden, assume a mystic character and take on
the authority of religious truths. The seven hundred Pyrotists set to
work with as much zeal as prudence, and made the most thorough inquiries
in secret. They were everywhere; they were seen nowhere. One would have
said that, like the pilot of Ulysses, they wandered freely over the
earth. They penetrated into the War Office and approached, under
different disguises, the judges, the registrars, and the witnesses of
the affair. Then Greatauk's cleverness was seen. The witnesses knew
nothing; the judges and registrars knew nothing. Emissaries reached
even Pyrot and anxiously questioned him in his cage amid the prolonged
moanings of the sea and the hoarse croaks of the ravens. It was in vain;
the prisoner knew nothing. The seven hundred Pyrotists could not subvert
the proofs of the accusation because they could not know what they were,
and they could not know what they were because there were none. Pyrot's
guilt was indefeasible through its very nullity. And it was with a
legitimate pride that Greatauk, expressing himself as a true artist,
said one day to General Panther: "This case is a master-piece: it is
made out of nothing." The seven hundred Pyrotists despaired of ever
clearing up this dark business, when suddenly they discovered, from
a stolen letter, that the eighty thousand trusses of hay had never
existed, that a most distinguished nobleman, Count de Maubec, had
sold them to the State, that he had received the price but had never
delivered them. Indeed seeing that he was descended from the richest
landed proprietors of ancient Penguinia, the heir of the Maubecs of
Dentdulynx, once the possessors of four duchies, sixty counties, and six
hundred and twelve marquisates, baronies, and viscounties, he did not
possess as much land as he could cover with his hand, and would not have
been able to cut a single day's mowing of forage off his own domains. As
to his getting a single rush from a land-owner or a merchant, that would
have been quite impossible, for everybody except the Ministers of State
and the Government officials knew that it would be easier to get blood
from a stone than a farthing from a Maubec.

The seven hundred Pyrotists made a minute inquiry concerning the Count
Maubec de la Dentdulynx's financial resources, and they proved that that
nobleman was chiefly supported by a house in which some genero