anachronisms, and she was in keen distress, because totally unable to account for them.  But as I further pondered them, this gloss gained new significance and I mentioned it.  My new inquiry flashed light upon her aged memory.  She explained at once that, to connect the two stories of Francoise and Alix, she had thought it right to impute these few words to Francoise rather than for mere exactness to thrust a detailed explanation of her own into a story hurrying to its close.  My question called back an incident of long ago and resulted first in her rummaging a whole day among her papers, and then in my receiving the certificate of a gentleman of high official standing in Louisiana that, on the 10th of last April (1889), this lady, in his presence, took from a large trunk of written papers, variously dated and “appearing to be perfectly genuine,” a book of memoranda from which, writes he, “I copy the following paragraph written by Madame S. de la Houssaye herself in the middle of the book, on page 29.”  Then follows in French: 

June 20, 1841.—­M.  Gerbeau has dined here again.  What a singular story he tells me.  We talked of my grandmother and Madame Carpentier, and what does M. Gerbeau tell me but that Alix had not finished her history when my grandmother and my aunt returned, and that he had promised to get it to them.  “And I kept it two years for want of an opportunity,” he added.  How mad Grandmamma must have been!  How the delay must have made her suffer!

Well and good!  Then Alix did write her story!  But if she wrote for both her “dear and good friends,” Suzanne and Francoise, then Francoise, the younger and milder sister, would the more likely have to be content, sooner or later, with a copy.  This, I find no reason to doubt, is what lies before me.  Indeed, here (crossed out in the manuscript, but by me restored and italicized) are signs of a copyist’s pen:  “Mais helas! il desesperoit de reussir quand’ il desespe rencontra,” etc.  Is not that a copyist’s repetition?  Or this:”—­et lui, mon mari apres tout se fit mon marim domestique.”  And here the copyist misread the original:  “Lorsque le maire entendit les noms et les personnes prenoms de la mariee,” etc.  In the manuscript personnes is crossed out, and the correct word, prenoms, is written above it.

Whoever made this copy it remains still so simple and compact that he or she cannot be charged with many embellishments.  And yet it is easy to believe that some one, with that looseness of family tradition and largeness of ancestral pride so common among the Creoles, in half-knowledge and half-ignorance should have ventured aside for an instant to attribute in pure parenthesis to an ancestral De la Houssaye the premature honor of a San Domingan war; or, incited by some tradition of the old Prime Minister’s intimate friendship with Madelaine’s family, should have imputed a gracious attention to the wrong Count de Maurepas, or to the wrong count altogether.