“Oh, ’Yseult La Blonde’,” he exclaimed, bitterly.  “You are reading that book, Madame?  Well, learn that Mademoiselle Vivian Bell has stolen an inscription from me, and that she has altered it, moreover, by putting it into verse.  You will find it on page 109 of her book:  ’A shade may weep over a shade.’  You hear, Madame?  ‘A shade may weep over a shade.’  Well, those words are translated literally from a funeral inscription which I was the first to publish and to illustrate.  Last year, one day, when I was dining at your house, being placed by the side of Mademoiselle Bell, I quoted this phrase to her, and it pleased her a great deal.  At her request, the next day I translated into French the entire inscription and sent it to her.  And now I find it changed in this volume of verses under this title:  ’On the Sacred Way’—­the sacred way, that is I.”

And he repeated, in his bad humor: 

“I, Madame, am the sacred way.”

He was annoyed that the poet had not spoken to him about this inscription.  He would have liked to see his name at the top of the poem, in the verses, in the rhymes.  He wished to see his name everywhere, and always looked for it in the journals with which his pockets were stuffed.  But he had no rancor.  He was not really angry with Miss Bell.  He admitted gracefully that she was a distinguished person, and a poet that did great honor to England.

When he had gone, the Countess Martin asked ingenuously of Paul Vence if he knew why that good Madame Marmet had looked at M. Schmoll with such marked though silent anger.  He was surprised that she did not know.

“I never know anything,” she said.

“But the quarrel between Schmoll and Marmet is famous.  It ceased only at the death of Marmet.

“The day that poor Marmet was buried, snow was falling.  We were wet and frozen to the bones.  At the grave, in the wind, in the mud, Schmoll read under his umbrella a speech full of jovial cruelty and triumphant pity, which he took afterward to the newspapers in a mourning carriage.  An indiscreet friend let Madame Marmet hear of it, and she fainted.  Is it possible, Madame, that you have not heard of this learned and ferocious quarrel?

“The Etruscan language was the cause of it.  Marmet made it his unique study.  He was surnamed Marmet the Etruscan.  Neither he nor any one else knew a word of that language, the last vestige of which is lost.  Schmoll said continually to Marmet:  ’You do not know Etruscan, my dear colleague; that is the reason why you are an honorable savant and a fair-minded man.’  Piqued by his ironic praise, Marmet thought of learning a little Etruscan.  He read to his colleague a memoir on the part played by flexions in the idiom of the ancient Tuscans.”

Madame Martin asked what a flexion was.

“Oh, Madame, if I explain anything to you, it will mix up everything.  Be content with knowing that in that memoir poor Marmet quoted Latin texts and quoted them wrong.  Schmoll is a Latinist of great learning, and, after Mommsen, the chief epigraphist of the world.