of jovial cruelty and triumphant pity,
which he took afterward to the newspapers in a mourning carriage. An
indiscreet friend let Madame Marmet hear of it, and she fainted. Is it
possible, Madame, that you have not heard of this learned and ferocious
quarrel?

"The Etruscan language was the cause of it. Marmet made it his unique
study. He was surnamed Marmet the Etruscan. Neither he nor any one else
knew a word of that language, the last vestige of which is lost. Schmoll
said continually to Marmet: 'You do not know Etruscan, my dear colleague;
that is the reason why you are an honorable savant and a fair-minded
man.' Piqued by his ironic praise, Marmet thought of learning a little
Etruscan. He read to his colleague a memoir on the part played by
flexions in the idiom of the ancient Tuscans."

Madame Martin asked what a flexion was.

"Oh, Madame, if I explain anything to you, it will mix up everything. Be
content with knowing that in that memoir poor Marmet quoted Latin texts
and quoted them wrong. Schmoll is a Latinist of great learning, and,
after Mommsen, the chief epigraphist of the world.

"He reproached his young colleague--Marmet was not fifty years old--with
reading Etruscan too well and Latin not well enough. From that time
Marmet had no rest. At every meeting he was mocked unmercifully; and,
finally, in spite of his softness, he got angry. Schmoll is without
rancor. It is a virtue of his race. He does not bear ill-will to those
whom he persecutes. One day, as he went up the stairway of the Institute
with Renan and Oppert, he met Marmet, and extended his hand to him.
Marmet refused to take it, and said 'I do not know you.'--'Do you take me
for a Latin inscription?' Schmoll replied. Marmet died and was buried
because of that satire. Now you know the reason why his widow sees his
enemy with horror."

"And I have made them dine together, side by side."

"Madame, it was not immoral, but it was cruel."

"My dear sir, I shall shock you, perhaps; but if I had to choose, I
should like better to do an immoral thing than a cruel one."

A young man, tall, thin, dark, with a long moustache, entered, and bowed
with brusque suppleness.

"Monsieur Vence, I think that you know Monsieur Le Menil."

They had met before at Madame Martin's, and saw each other often at the
Fencing Club. The day before they had met at Madame Meillan's.

"Madame Meillan's--there's a house where one is bored," said Paul Vence.

"Yet Acade