“Oh, great genius!” he went on, taking up the open book near him, “great philosopher, called a sophist by the ignorant—­how deep a truth you uttered in writing these lines, that I never read over without a shudder:  ’Imagine a Chinese mandarin, living in a fabulous country three thousand leagues away, whom you have never seen and shall never see—­imagine, moreover, that the death of this mandarin, this man, almost a myth, would make you a millionaire, and that you have but to lift your finger, at home, in France, to bring about his death, without the possibility of ever being called to account for it by any one; say, what would you do?’

“That fearful passage must have made many men dream—­and does not Bianchon, that great materialist, so well painted by Balzac, confess that he has got as far as his thirty-third mandarin?  What a St. Bartholomew of mandarins, if my philosopher’s supposition could grow into a truth!”

Felix ceased his soliloquy, and bent his head to let the storm raised in his soul by the atheist philosopher pass over.  His bad instincts, aroused, spoke louder at that instant than reason, louder than reality.  His glance fell on the chimney-piece, where a porcelain figure, the grotesque chef d’oeuvre of some great Chinese artist, leered at him with its everlasting grin.  The young man smiled.  “Perhaps that is the likeness of a mandarin—­bulbous nose, hanging cheeks, moustaches drooping like plumes, a peaked head, knotty hands—­a regular deformity.  Reflecting on the ugliness of that idiotic race, there is much to be urged by way of excuse for people who kill mandarins.”

Some persistent thought evidently haunted Felix’s mind.  Again he drove it off, and again it beset him.

“Pshaw!” he exclaimed, after a last brief struggle, “I am alone, and out of sorts.  I will amuse myself with a carnival freak, a mere theoretic and philosophic piece of nonsense.  I have tried many worse ones.  It wants a quarter to twelve.  I give myself fifteen minutes to study my spells.  Let me see, what mandarin shall I murder?  I don’t know any, and I have no peerage list of the Flowery Empire.  Let me try the newspapers.”

It was in the height of the English war with China.  On the seventh column of the paper our hero found a proclamation signed by the imperial commissioners, Lin, Lou, Lun, and Li.

“Here goes for Li,” he said to himself.  “He is likely to be the youngest.”

The clock began to strike, announcing the hour.  Felix placed himself solemnly before the mirror, and said aloud, in a grave tone:  “If the death of Mandarin Li will make me rich and powerful, whatever may come of it, I vote for the death of Mandarin Li.”  He lifted his finger—­at that instant the porcelain figure rocked on its base, and fell in fragments at Felix’s feet.  The glass reflected his startled face.  He thrilled for an instant with superstitious terror, but recollecting that his finger had touched the fragile figure, he accounted for it as an accident, and went to bed and to such repose as a debtor can enjoy with an execution hanging over his head.