he had weakened in one manly resolve—­against his will he married.  The lady was a Fusilier, Agricola’s sister, a person of rare intelligence and beauty, whom, from early childhood, the secret counsels of his seniors had assigned to him.  Despite this, he had said he would never marry; he made, he said, no pretensions to severe conscientiousness, or to being better than others, but—­as between his Maker and himself—­he had forfeited the right to wed, they all knew how.  But the Fusiliers had become very angry and Numa, finding strife about to ensue just when without unity he could not bring an undivided clan through the torrent of the revolution, had “nobly sacrificed a little sentimental feeling,” as his family defined it, by breaking faith with the mother of the man now standing at Joseph Frowenfeld’s elbow, and who was then a little toddling boy.  It was necessary to save the party—­nay, that was a slip; we should say, to save the family; this is not a parable.  Yet Numa loved his wife.  She bore him a boy and a girl, twins; and as her son grew in physical, intellectual, and moral symmetry, he indulged the hope that—­the ambition and pride of all the various Grandissimes now centering in this lawful son, and all strife being lulled—­he should yet see this Honore right the wrongs which he had not quite dared to uproot.  And Honore inherited the hope and began to make it an intention and aim even before his departure (with his half-brother the other Honore) for school in Paris, at the early age of fifteen.  Numa soon after died, and Honore, after various fortunes in Paris, London, and elsewhere, in the care, or at least company, of a pious uncle in holy orders, returned to the ancestral mansion.  The father’s will—­by the law they might have set it aside, but that was not their way—­left the darker Honore the bulk of his fortune, the younger a competency.  The latter—­instead of taking office, as an ancient Grandissime should have done—­to the dismay and mortification of his kindred, established himself in a prosperous commercial business.  The elder bought houses and became a rentier.

* * * * *

The landlord handed the apothecary the following writing: 

     MR. JOSEPH FROWENFELD: 

Think not that anybody is to be either poisoned by me nor yet to be made a sufferer by the exercise of anything by me of the character of what is generally known as grigri, otherwise magique.  This, sir, I do beg your permission to offer my assurance to you of the same.  Ah, no! it is not for that!  I am the victim of another entirely and a far differente and dissimilar passion, i.e., Love.  Esteemed sir, speaking or writing to you as unto the only man of exclusively white blood whom I believe is in Louisiana willing to do my dumb, suffering race the real justice, I love Palmyre la Philosophe with a madness which is by the human lips or tongues not possible to be exclaimed (as, I may add, that I have in the same like