of cooking that assailed his nostrils. Indeed a noble
smell of rich, savoury broth filled the painter's studio.

"You are very obliging, sir," replied the good dame. "To prepare the
digestion for your capon, I have made a vegetable soup with a slice of
fat bacon and a big beef bone. There's nothing like a marrowbone, sir,
to give soup a flavour."

"The maxim does you honour, _citoyenne_," returned the old man. "And you
will be doing wisely to put back again to-morrow and the day after, all
the week, in fact, to put back again, I say, this precious bone in the
pot, which it will continue to flavour. The wise woman of Panzoust
always did so; she used to make a soup of green cabbages with a rind of
rusty bacon and an old _savorados_. That is what in her country, which
is also mine, they call the medullary bone, the most tasty and most
succulent of all bones."

"This lady you speak of, sir," remarked the _citoyenne_ Gamelin, "was
she not rather a saving soul, to make the same bone serve so many times
over?"

"Oh! she lived in a small way," explained Brotteaux, "she was poor,
albeit a prophetess."

At that moment, Evariste Gamelin returned, agitated by the confession he
had heard and determined to know who was Elodie's betrayer, to avenge at
one and the same time the Republic's wrong and his own on the miscreant.

After the usual greetings had been exchanged, the _citoyen_ Brotteaux
resumed the thread of his discourse:

"It is seldom those who make a trade of foretelling the future grow
rich. Their impostures are too soon found out and their trickery renders
them odious. But indeed we should be bound to detest them much worse if
they prophesied truly. A man's life would be intolerable if he knew what
is to befall him. He would be aware of calamities to come and suffer
their pains in advance, while he would get no joy of present blessings
whose end he would foresee. Ignorance is a necessary condition of human
happiness, and it must be owned that in most cases we fulfil it well. We
know almost nothing about ourselves; absolutely nothing about our
neighbours. Ignorance constitutes our peace of mind; self-deception our
felicity."

The _citoyenne_ Gamelin set the soup on the table, said the Benedicite
and seated her son and her guest at the board. She stood up herself to
eat, declining the chair the _citoyen_ Brotteaux offered her beside him;
she said she knew what good manners required of a woman.

VI

Ten