His voice trembled, and the slender wand shivered in his hand.  Was this nervousness?  Or was he, in accordance with the quaintness of his costume and the amplitude of his beard, enacting the feebleness of age?

He advanced to the front of the platform.  “Three things I require,” he said.  “A watch, a pocket-handkerchief and a hat.  Is there here among my visitors any person so gracious as to lend me these trifles?  I will not injure them, ladies and gentlemen.  I will only pound the watch in my mortar—­burn the mouchoir in my lamp, and make a pudding in the chapeau.  And, with all this, I engage to return them to their proprietors, better as new.”

There was a pause, and a laugh.  Presently a gentleman volunteered his hat, and a lady her embroidered handkerchief; but no person seemed willing to submit his watch to the pounding process.

“Shall nobody lend me the watch?” asked the Chevalier; but in a voice so hoarse that I scarcely recognised it.

A sudden thought struck me, and I rose in my place.

“I shall be happy to do so,” I said aloud, and made my way round to the front of the platform.

At the moment when he took it from me, I spoke to him.

“Monsieur Proudhine,” I whispered, “you are ill!  What can I do for you?”

“Nothing, mon enfant,” he answered, in the same low tone.  “I suffer; mais il faut se resigner.”

“Break off the performance—­retire for half an hour.”

“Impossible.  See, they already observe us!”

And he drew back abruptly.  There was a seat vacant in the front row.  I took it, resolved at all events to watch him narrowly.

Not to detail too minutely the events of a performance which since that time has become sufficiently familiar, I may say that he carried out his programme with dreadful exactness, and, after appearing to burn the handkerchief to ashes and mix up a quantity of eggs and flour in the hat, proceeded very coolly to smash the works of my watch beneath his ponderous pestle.  Notwithstanding my faith, I began to feel seriously uncomfortable.  It was a neat little silver watch of foreign workmanship—­not very valuable, to be sure, but precious to me as the most precious of repeaters.

“He is very tough, your watch, Monsieur,” said the Wizard, pounding away vigorously.  “He—­he takes a long time ... Ah! mon Dieu!”

He raised his hand to his head, uttered a faint cry, and snatched at the back of the chair for support.

My first thought was that he had destroyed my watch by mistake—­my second, that he was very ill indeed.  Scarcely knowing what I did, and quite forgetting the audience, I jumped on the platform to his aid.

He shook his head, waved me away with one trembling hand, made a last effort to articulate, and fell heavily to the ground.