I find no other theory tenable.  To reject the whole matter as a forgery flies into the face of more incontestable facts than the anachronisms do.  We know, from Suzanne and Francoise, without this manuscript, that there was an Alix Carpentier, daughter of a count, widow of a viscount, an emigree of the Revolution, married to a Norman peasant, known to M. Gerbeau, beloved of Suzanne and Francoise, with whom they journeyed to Attakapas, and who wrote for them the history of her strange life.  I hold a manuscript carefully kept by at least two generations of Francoise’s descendants among their valuable private papers.  It professes to be that history—­a short, modest, unadorned narrative, apparently a copy of a paper of like compass, notwithstanding the evident insertion of two impossible statements whose complete omission does not disturb the narrative.  I see no room to doubt that it contains the true story of a real and lovely woman.  But to come back to my attorney.

While his grave negotiations were still going on, there met me one evening at my own gate a lady in black, seeking advice concerning her wish to sell to some publisher a private diary never intended for publication.

“That kind is the best,” I said.  “Did you write it during the late war?” I added at a guess.

“Yes.”

“I suppose, then, it contains a careful record of each day’s public events.”

“No, I’m sorry to say—­”

“Nay, don’t be sorry; that lack may save it from the waste-basket.”  Then my heart spoke.  “Ah! madam, if you had only done what no woman seems to have seen the importance of doing—­written the women’s side of that awful war—­”

“That’s just what I have done,” she interrupted.  “I was a Union woman, in the Confederacy.  I couldn’t talk; I had to write.  I was in the siege of Vicksburg from beginning to end.”

“Leave your manuscript with me,” I said.  “If, on examining it, I find I can recommend it to a publisher, I will do so.  But remember what I have already told you—­the passage of an unknown writer’s work through an older author’s hands is of no benefit to it whatever.  It is a bad sign rather than a good one.  Your chances of acceptance will be at least no less if you send this to the publishers yourself.”

No, she would like me to intervene.

How my attorney friend and I took a two days’ journey by rail, reading the manuscript to each other in the Pullman car; how a young newly married couple next us across the aisle, pretending not to notice, listened with all their might; how my friend the attorney now and then stopped to choke down tears; and how the young stranger opposite came at last, with apologies, asking where this matter would be published and under what title, I need not tell.  At length I was intercessor for a manuscript that publishers would not lightly decline.  I bought it for my little museum of true stories, at a price beyond what I believe any magazine would have paid—­an amount that must have filled the widow’s heart with joy, but as certainly was not beyond its worth to me.  I have already contributed a part of this manuscript to “The Century” as one of its “Wax-papers.”  But by permission it is restored here to its original place.