For the purposes of this constant spying upon his household, he made use of a stone bench set in the gravel behind an enormous Paulownia.  He would sit there whole days at a time, neither reading nor thinking, simply watching to see who went in or out.  For the night he had invented something different.  In the great vestibule at the main entrance, which opened upon the front steps with their array of bright flowers, he had caused an opening to be made leading to his bedroom on the floor above.  An acoustic tube of an improved type was supposed to convey to his ears every sound on the ground floor, even to the conversation of the servants taking the air on the steps.

Unluckily, the instrument was so powerful that it exaggerated all the noises, confused them and prolonged them, and the powerful, regular ticking of a great clock, the cries of a paroquet kept in one of the lower rooms, the clucking of a hen in search of a lost kernel of corn, were all Monsieur Gardinois could hear when he applied his ear to the tube.  As for voices, they reached him in the form of a confused buzzing, like the muttering of a crowd, in which it was impossible to distinguish anything.  He had nothing to show for the expense of the apparatus, and he concealed his wonderful tube in a fold of his bed-curtains.

One night Gardinois, who had fallen asleep, was awakened suddenly by the creaking of a door.  It was an extraordinary thing at that hour.  The whole house hold was asleep.  Nothing could be heard save the footsteps of the watch-dogs on the sand, or their scratching at the foot of a tree in which an owl was screeching.  An excellent opportunity to use his listening-tube!  Upon putting it to his ear, M. Gardinois was assured that he had made no mistake.  The sounds continued.  One door was opened, then another.  The bolt of the front door was thrown back with an effort.  But neither Pyramus nor Thisbe, not even Kiss, the formidable Newfoundland, had made a sign.  He rose softly to see who those strange burglars could be, who were leaving the house instead of entering it; and this is what he saw through the slats of his blind: 

A tall, slender young man, with Georges’s figure and carriage, arm-in-arm with a woman in a lace mantilla.  They stopped first at the bench by the Paulownia, which was in full bloom.

It was a superb moonlight night.  The moon, silvering the treetops, made numberless flakes of light amid the dense foliage.  The terraces, white with moonbeams, where the Newfoundlands in their curly coats went to and fro, watching the night butterflies, the smooth, deep waters of the ponds, all shone with a mute, calm brilliance, as if reflected in a silver mirror.  Here and there glow-worms twinkled on the edges of the greensward.

The two promenaders remained for a moment beneath the shade of the Paulownia, sitting silent on the bench, lost in the dense darkness which the moon makes where its rays do not reach.  Suddenly they appeared in the bright light, wrapped in a languishing embrace; then walked slowly across the main avenue, and disappeared among the trees.