usand francs,--the sum to which his savings then amounted. He offered
them to one of the faithful friends of the king for transmission to his
master, speaking of his approaching death, and declaring that the money
came originally from the goodness of the king, and, moreover, that the
property of the last of the Valois belonged of right to the crown. It is
not known whether the fervor of his zeal conquered the reluctance of the
Bourbon, who abandoned his fine kingdom of France without carrying away
with him a farthing, and who ought to have been touched by the devotion
of the chevalier. It is certain, however, that Cesarine, the residuary
legate of the old man, received from his estate only six hundred francs
a year. The chevalier returned to Alencon, cruelly weakened by grief and
by fatigue; he died on the very day when Charles X. arrived on a foreign
shore.

Madame du Val-Noble and her protector, who was just then afraid of
the vengeance of the liberal party, were glad of a pretext to remain
incognito in the village where Suzanne's mother died. At the sale of the
chevalier's effects, which took place at that time, Suzanne, anxious to
obtain a souvenir of her first and last friend, pushed up the price
of the famous snuff-box, which was finally knocked down to her for a
thousand francs. The portrait of the Princess Goritza was alone worth
that sum. Two years later, a young dandy, who was making a collection
of the fine snuff-boxes of the last century, obtained from Madame du
Val-Noble the chevalier's treasure. The charming confidant of many a
love and the pleasure of an old age is now on exhibition in a species
of private museum. If the dead could know what happens after them, the
chevalier's head would surely blush upon its left cheek.

If this history has no other effect than to inspire the possessors of
precious relics with holy fear, and induce them to make codicils to
secure these touching souvenirs of joys that are no more by bequeathing
them to loving hands, it will have done an immense service to the
chivalrous and romantic portion of the community; but it does, in truth,
contain a far higher moral. Does it not show the necessity for a
new species of education? Does it not invoke, from the enlightened
solicitude of the ministers of Public Instruction, the creation of
chairs of anthropology,--a science in which Germany outstrips us? Modern
myths are even less understood than ancient ones, harried as we are with
m