“Can you see her,” said Lousteau, “clasping Monsieur Adolphe in her arms, to her heart, throwing her whole life into a kiss?—­Adolphe I see as a well-made young man, but not clever—­the sort of man an Italian woman likes.  Rinaldo hovers behind the scenes of a plot we do not know, but which must be as full of incident as a melodrama by Pixerecourt.  Or we can imagine Rinaldo crossing the stage in the background like a figure in one of Victor Hugo’s plays.”

“He, perhaps, is the husband,” exclaimed Madame de la Baudraye.

“Do you understand anything of it all?” Madame Piedefer asked of the Presidente.

“Why, it is charming!” said Dinah to her mother.

All the good folks of Sancerre sat with eyes as large as five-franc pieces.

“Go on, I beg,” said the hostess.

Lousteau went on:—­

  210 OLYMPIA

  “Your key——­”

  “Have you lost it?”

  “It is in the arbor.”

  “Let us hasten.”

  “Can the Cardinal have taken it?”

  “No, here it is.”

  “What danger we have escaped!”

Olympia looked at the key, and fancied she recognized it as her own.  But Rinaldo had changed it; his cunning had triumphed; he had the right key.  Like a modern Cartouche, he was no less skilful than bold, and suspecting that nothing but a vast treasure could require a duchess to carry it constantly at her belt.

“Guess!” cried Lousteau.  “The corresponding page is not here.  We must look to page 212 to relieve our anxiety.”

  212 OLYMPIA

  “If the key had been lost?”

  “He would now be a dead man.”

“Dead?  But ought you not to grant the last request he made, and to give him his liberty on the con- ditions——­”

  “You do not know him.”

  “But—­”

  “Silence!  I took you for my
  lover, not for my confessor.”

  Adolphe was silent.

“And then comes an exquisite galloping goat, a tail-piece drawn by Normand, and cut by Duplat.—­the names are signed,” said Lousteau.

“Well, and then?” said such of the audience as understood.

“That is the end of the chapter,” said Lousteau.  “The fact of this tailpiece changes my views as to the authorship.  To have his book got up, under the Empire, with vignettes engraved on wood, the writer must have been a Councillor of State, or Madame Barthelemy-Hadot, or the late lamented Desforges, or Sewrin.”

“’Adolphe was silent.’—­Ah!” cried Bianchon, “the Duchess must have been under thirty.”

“If there is no more, invent a conclusion,” said Madame de la Baudraye.

“You see,” said Lousteau, “the waste sheet has been printed fair on one side only.  In printer’s lingo, it is a back sheet, or, to make it clearer, the other side which would have to be printed is covered all over with pages printed one above another, all experiments in making up.  It would take too long to explain to you all the complications of a making-up sheet; but you may understand that it will show no more trace of the first twelve pages that were printed on it than you would in the least remember the first stroke of the bastinado if a Pasha condemned you to have fifty on the soles of your feet.”