Andre-Louis looked from father to daughter, and smiled.  “Pardi!” said he.  “I am between bludgeon and dagger.  If I escape with my life, I shall be fortunate.  Why, then, since you pin me to the very wall, I’ll tell you what I should do.  I should go back to the original and help myself more freely from it.”

“The original?” questioned M. Binet — the author.

“It is called, I believe, ‘Monsieur de Pourceaugnac,’ and was written by Moliere.”

Somebody tittered, but that somebody was not M. Binet.  He had been touched on the raw, and the look in his little eyes betrayed the fact that his bonhomme exterior covered anything but a bonhomme.

“You charge me with plagiarism,” he said at last; “with filching the ideas of Moliere.”

“There is always, of course,” said Andre-Louis, unruffled, “the alternative possibility of two great minds working upon parallel lines.”

M. Binet studied the young man attentively a moment.  He found him bland and inscrutable, and decided to pin him down.

“Then you do not imply that I have been stealing from Moliere?”

“I advise you to do so, monsieur,” was the disconcerting reply.

M. Binet was shocked.

“You advise me to do so!  You advise me, me, Antoine Binet, to turn thief at my age!”

“He is outrageous,” said mademoiselle, indignantly.

“Outrageous is the word.  I thank you for it, my dear.  I take you on trust, sir.  You sit at my table, you have the honour to be included in my company, and to my face you have the audacity to advise me to become a thief — the worst kind of thief that is conceivable, a thief of spiritual things, a thief of ideas!  It is insufferable, intolerable!  I have been, I fear, deeply mistaken in you, monsieur; just as you appear to have been mistaken in me.  I am not the scoundrel you suppose me, sir, and I will not number in my company a man who dares to suggest that I should become one.  Outrageous!”

He was very angry.  His voice boomed through the little room, and the company sat hushed and something scared, their eyes upon Andre-Louis, who was the only one entirely unmoved by this outburst of virtuous indignation.

“You realize, monsieur,” he said, very quietly, “that you are insulting the memory of the illustrious dead?”

“Eh?” said Binet.

Andre-Louis developed his sophistries.

“You insult the memory of Moliere, the greatest ornament of our stage, one of the greatest ornaments of our nation, when you suggest that there is vileness in doing that which he never hesitated to do, which no great author yet has hesitated to do.  You cannot suppose that Moliere ever troubled himself to be original in the matter of ideas.  You cannot suppose that the stories he tells in his plays have never been told before.  They were culled, as you very well know — though you seem momentarily to have forgotten it, and it is therefore necessary