ther, the Son,
and the Holy Ghost, and by the will of the French
people."--EDITOR.]

"'As a present?' she shrieked for joy; and hurried away as fast as her
legs would carry her.

"In about six months from that day the statue was finished. I had no
further need of Clementine's services, and gradually all thought of her
slipped from my mind. You may have heard that some time after my work
was despatched to Greece, I was assaulted one night in the Rue
Childebert, on my way to Gerard de Nerval's. My skull was split open in
two places, I was left for dead in the street, and but for a workman who
stumbled over me, took me home, and sat up with me until morning, I
might not have lived to tell the tale. From the very first I suspected
the identity of my assailant, though I have never breathed his name to
any one. I am glad to say I never had many enemies, nor have I now, as
far as I am aware; but I had offended the man by withholding my vote in
a prize competition. He was, however, not responsible for his actions;
for even at that time he must have been mad. A few years afterwards, the
suspicion both of his madness and his attempt upon my life became a
certainty, for he repeated the latter. You are very young, and youth is
either very credulous or very sceptical. We should be neither. If what I
am going to tell you now were to be represented to you at the Ambigu or
Porte Saint-Martin, you, as an educated man, would shrug your shoulders,
and look with a kind of good-natured contempt upon the grisette or
workman or bourgeois who would sit spellbound and take it all in as so
much gospel. Providence, fate, call it what you will, concocts more
striking dramatic situations and a greater number of them than M. Scribe
and all his compeers have constructed in the course of their
professional careers. Listen, and you shall judge for yourself.

"About seven years after the attack in the Rue Childebert, I received a
letter one morning, inviting me to attend a meeting that same night
between twelve and one, at a house in the Faubourg Saint-Jacques, near
the hospital of the Val-de-Grace. The letter told me how to proceed.
There being no concierge in the house, I was to provide myself with a
'dark lantern,' and to go up four flights of stairs, where I should find
a door with a cross chalked upon it. It would be opened by my giving a
particular knock. My previous danger notwithstanding, I had not the
least suspicion of thi