Chapter 3

On leaving the prison, Marceline and Adolphe were, very naturally,
full of curiosity to learn the reasons of Theophrastus' extraordinary
behaviour; and he had the greatest difficulty in getting them away from
the subject. He treated the matter lightly, declaring that the whim had
taken him to visit the cellars of the Conciergerie; and he had visited
them. They were even more impressed by his attitude to the guide than
by his actual plunge into the cellars. That Theophrastus, the timid
Theophrastus, should have browbeaten not a mere man, but an official,
amazed them. Theophrastus admits that he was as much amazed as they,
and felt rather proud of himself. All the evening they kept recurring
to the matter until their amazement and their interest began to weaken
by mere continuance of expression. But Theophrastus was glad indeed
when sleep at last tied Marceline's tongue.

The next day he shut himself up in his study on the pretext of
straightening out his accounts. Its window looks down on to the little
grass-plot in the middle of Anvers Square; and he leaned out over the
sill, contemplating the prosaic reality of the scene as if he could
not have enough of it. He was above all pleased by the nurses wheeling
along their babies in perambulators and by the shouting of the children
romping about the Square.

His thought was of a great unity and a great simplicity. It was
entirely contained in the phrase: "The World has not changed."

No: the world had not changed. There were the babies in the
perambulators; and as the clock struck two the Signora Petito, wife of
the Professor of Italian who occupied the flat above his, began to play
_The Carnival of Venice_.

No: nothing in the world had changed; yet when he turned round, he
could see on his desk, among the models of rubber stamps, a scrap of
paper.

Did that scrap of paper _really_ exist? He had passed a feverish night,
almost a night of delirium; and at the end of it he had decided that
his strange adventure must have been a bad dream. But in the morning he
had found the scrap of paper in a drawer of his desk...

Even now he kept saying to himself, "I shall turn round presently; and
the scrap of paper won't be there." He turned round; and the scrap of
paper was there--_in his own handwriting_.

He passed his hand over his perspiring brow and heaved the sigh of
a grieved child. Then he seemed to come to a definite resolve and
carefully put the scrap of paper into his pocket-book. He had just
remembered that Signor Petito had a great reputation as an expert in
handwriting. His friend Adolphe was also an expert in handwriting,
but from the Spiritualistic point of view. He told the character by
it. Theophrastus had no intention of calling Adolphe into counsel.
There was already too much mystery in the affair to entrust it to the
overflowing imagination of a medium who boasted himself a pupil of a
Papus.

He went slowly upstairs and was ushered into Signor Petito's study.

He found himself in the presence of a man of middle age, whose chief
characteristics were a mass of crinkly black hair, a piercing glance,
and enormous ears. After they had exchanged greetings, Theophrastus
broached the subject of the scrap of paper. He drew it from his
pocket-book and an unsigned letter which he had written a few days
previously.

"Signor Petito," he said, "I understand that you are a first-class
expert in handwriting. I should be much obliged if you would examine
this letter and this document, and inform me of the result of your
examination. I assert myself that there is no connection--"

He stopped short, as red as a peony, for he was not in the habit of
lying. But Signor Petito had already scanned the letter and the scrap
of paper with the eye of an expert; and with a smile which showed all
his exceedingly white teeth, he said:

"I won't keep you waiting for my answer, M. Longuet. The document is
in a very bad state; but the scraps of handwriting one can read are in
every respect the same as the handwriting of the letter. Before the
Courts, M. Longuet, before God and before men, these two handwritings
were traced _by the same hand_!" He laid his hand on his heart with a
great air.

He entered into particulars: a child, he declared, could not make a
mistake about it. He became oracular.

"The handwriting in both is equally angular," he said in a very
pompous tone. "By angular, M. Longuet, we describe a handwriting in
which the thin strokes which join the strokes of the letters and the
letters to one another are at an acute angle. You understand? Look at
this hook, and this one, and this thin stroke, and all these letters
which increase progressively in equal proportions. But what an acute
handwriting, M. Longuet! I have never seen handwriting so acute: _it's
as sharp as the blade of a knife_!"

At these last words Theophrastus turned so pale that Signor Petito
thought that he was going to faint. None the less he took the letter
and the document, thanked Signor Petito, and went out of the flat.

He walked straight out of the house and wandered about the streets
for a long while. At last he found himself in Saint-Andrew-des-Arts
Place; then he took his way to Suger Street, and opened the latch of an
old-fashioned door. He found himself in a dark and dirty passage. A man
came down it to meet him, and recognising him, greeted him.

"How are you, Theophrastus? What good wind blows you here?" he said in
affectionate tones.

"How are you, Ambrose?" said Theophrastus gloomily.

Since they had not met for two years, they had a hundred inquiries to
make of one another. Ambrose was an engraver of visiting-cards by
profession. He had been a printer in the Provinces; but having put all
his capital into a new invention in printing, it had not been long
before he found himself a bankrupt. He was a cousin of Marceline; and
Theophrastus, who was a good soul, had come to his aid in the hour of
his gravest trouble.

Theophrastus sat down on a straw-seated chair in a little room which
served as workshop, and was lighted by a large, dusty skylight in the
ceiling.

"You 're a scientific man, Ambrose," he said, still gloomily.

"Nothing of the kind!" said Ambrose quickly.

"Yes; you are. No one could teach you anything in the matter of paper."

"Oh, yes: that's true enough. I do know paper."

"You know all papers," said Theophrastus.

"All," said Ambrose with modest pride.

"If one showed you a piece of paper you could tell the age of it?"

"Yes; I have published a monograph on the water-marks of the papers
used in France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The
Academy crowned it."

"I know it. And I have the fullest confidence in your knowledge of
papers," said Theophrastus with unrelieved gloom.

"It's well-founded; but really it's a very simple matter. The oldest
papers presented at first, when they were new, a smooth, glossy
surface. But soon wire-marks appeared in them, crossed at regular
intervals by perpendicular lines, both reproducing the impression of
the metal trellis on which the paste was spread. In the fourteenth
century they had the idea of utilising this reproduction by making it a
mark of the source or mill which the paper came from. With this object
in view, they embroidered in brass wire on the trellis mould, initials,
words, and all kinds of emblems: these are the water-marks. Every
water-marked sheet of paper carries in itself its birth-certificate;
but the difficulty is to decipher it. It requires a little practice:
the pot, the eagle, the bell..."

Theophrastus opened his pocket-book and held out his scrap of paper
with trembling fingers.

"Could you tell me the exact age of this document?" he said.

Ambrose put on his spectacles and held the paper up to the light.

"There's a date," he said. "172... The last figure is missing. It
would be a paper of the eighteenth century then. Given the date within
ten years, our task becomes very simple."

"Oh, I saw the date," said Theophrastus quickly. "But is this really an
eighteenth-century paper? Isn't the date false? That's what I want to
know."

Ambrose pointed to the middle of the scrap.

"Look," he said.

Theophrastus looked; but he saw nothing. Then Ambrose lighted a little
lamp and threw its light on the document. In holding the scrap of paper
between one's eyes and the lamp one distinguished in the middle of it a
kind of crown.

"This paper's extremely rare, Theophrastus!" cried Ambrose in
considerable excitement. "This water-mark is almost unknown, for very
little of it was manufactured. The water-mark is called 'The Crown of
Thorns.' This paper, my dear Theophrastus, is exactly of the year 1721."

"You are sure of it?"

"Absolutely. But how comes it that this document, which is dated 1721,
is, in every part of it which is visible, in your handwriting?" cried
Ambrose in a tone of amazement.

Theophrastus rose, put the document back into his pocket-book, and went
out on stumbling feet, without answering.

I reproduce from the medley of documents of which his memoirs are
composed the following passage:

"So now," writes Theophrastus, "I had the proof; I could no longer
doubt; I had no longer the right to doubt. This scrap of paper which
dated from the beginning of the eighteenth century, from the times of
the Regent, this sheet which I had found, or rather _had gone to seek_
in a prison, was truly in my own handwriting. I had written on this
sheet, I, Theophrastus Longuet, late manufacturer of rubber stamps, who
had only retired the week before, at the age of forty-one years, I had
written on this sheet the still incomprehensible words which I read on
it, in 1721! Besides, I had not really any need of Signor Petito, or of
Ambrose, to assure me of it. All my being cried, 'It's your paper! It's
your paper!'"

"So before being Theophrastus Longuet, the son of Jean Longuet,
market-gardener at Ferté-sous-Jouarre, I had been in the past someone
whom I did not know, but who was re-born in me. Yes: every now and then
I 'foamed at the mouth' at remembering that I lived two hundred years
ago!

"Who was I? What was then my name? I had a strange certainty that these
questions would not remain unanswered for long. Was it not a fact that
already things of which in my present existence I was ignorant, were
rising from my past? What did certain phrases I had uttered at the
Conciergerie mean? Who was Simon the Auvergnat, whose name had risen
twice to my burning lips?

"Yes, yes: the name of long ago, _my_ name, would also rise to my
awakening brain; and knowing who I was, I should recall the whole of my
reviving life in the past, and read the document at a glance."

Theophrastus Longuet might well be troubled in mind. He was a simple,
rather dense, self-satisfied soul who had never believed in anything
but rubber stamps. A good-natured, strictly honest, narrow-minded
and obstinate tradesman, like the bulk of his class in France he had
considered religion only fit for women; and without declaring himself
an unbeliever, he had been wont to say that when one died one was dead
for a long time.

He had just learned in the most convincing, palpable fashion that _one
was never dead_.

It was indeed a blow. But he took it very well. From the moment that
he remembered having been alive at the beginning of the eighteenth
century, he began to regret that it was not two thousand years earlier.

That is the nature of the French tradesman; he is full of common sense;
but when he does exaggerate, he passes all bounds.

In his uncertainty about his previous existence he had two definite
facts to start from: the date 1721, and the Conciergerie prison.
These enabled him to affirm that in 1721 he had been confined in the
Conciergerie as a Prisoner of State: he could not admit for an instant
that even in the wicked times of Louis XV he, Theophrastus Longuet,
could possibly have been in prison for an offence against the Common
Law.

Again the scrap of paper gave grounds for certain inferences. At some
desperate conjuncture, possibly on the eve of his execution, he had
written it and hidden it in the wall, to find it on a passing visit,
two centuries later. There was nothing supernatural about that; it was
merely the logical explanation of the facts of the case.

He betook himself once more to the consideration of the document. Two
words in it seemed to him, naturally, of paramount importance. They
were the words "Betrayal" and "Treasures."

He hoped from these two words to reconstitute his earlier personality.
In the first place, it was plain that he had been rich and powerful.
Only rich men bury treasures; only powerful men are betrayed. It seemed
to him that it must have been a memorable, perhaps historic betrayal,
of _the betrayal of the First of April_.

Whatever else was mysterious about the document, it was quite clear
that he had been a great personage and had buried treasures.

"By Jove!" he said to himself. "Provided that no one has touched them,
those treasures belong to me! If need were, with this document in my
own handwriting I could establish my claim to them."

Theophrastus was not a rich man. He had retired from business with
a moderate competence: a cottage in the country, with its little
garden, its fountain, and its lawn. It was not much, with Marceline's
occasional fits of extravagance. Decidedly the treasures would come in
very useful.

At the same time we must give him the credit of being far more
interested in the mystery of his personality than in the mystery of
the treasures. He decided to postpone his search for them till he could
definitely give a name to the personage who had been Theophrastus in
1721. To his mind this discovery, which was of chief interest to him,
would be the key to all the rest.

He was somewhat astonished by the sudden disappearance of what he
called his "historical instinct." It had been lacking during the
earlier part of his life; but it had revealed itself to him in the
cellars of the Conciergerie with the suddenness and emphasis of a clap
of thunder. For a while the Other (in his mind he called the great
personage he had been in the eighteenth century the "Other") had taken
possession of him. The Other had been so completely master of him that
he had acted with the Other's hands and spoken with his voice. It was
the Other who had found the document. It was the Other who had cried,
"_Zounds! It's Straw Alley!_" It was the Other who had called _Simon
the Auvergnat_ and then had vanished. Theophrastus did not know what
had become of him. He sought in vain. He sounded himself, plumbing the
depths of his being. Nothing!

Theophrastus would not stand it. He had not been troubled all his life
long by any unhealthy curiosity about the beginning or end of things;
he had wasted no time on the mysteries of philosophy. He had shrugged
his shoulders at their futility. But since the revelation of the
extraordinary fact that a man sold rubber stamps in 1911 after burying
treasures in 1721, he swore to go to the end of the business. He would
know. He would know everything.

His "historical instinct" seemed to have left him for the time being,
he would hunt for it in books. He would assuredly end by finding
out who was the mysterious personage who had been shut up in the
Conciergerie in 1721 after having been betrayed on the First of April.
Which First of April? That remained to discover.

Little as the selling of rubber stamps fits man for historical
research, he betook himself to libraries and hunted for that personage.
He studied the lives of the chief men of the period. Since he was at
it, nothing was too grand for him: Princes, Peers, Statesmen, and
Generals, he studied the lives of all. He paused for a while at the
great financier Law, but found him too dissipated; the same objection
applied to the Comte du Barry; and he was positively horrified by the
thought that he might have been the Comte de Charolais, renowned for
his debaucheries, whose hobby was to shoot thatchers at work on the
house-roofs. For forty-eight hours he was the Cardinal de Polignac
before he was disgusted to learn that that great Churchman had not
been a man of stainless virtue. Whenever he did find a person whom the
historians painted in the most engaging colours and adorned with the
most solid virtues, that personage invariably disobliged him by not
having been shut up in the Conciergerie or betrayed on the First of
April.

However he had just discovered, _in the Journal de Barbier_, a
favourite of the Regent who, strangely enough, was exactly the man
he was looking for, when there came a development of his case which
plunged him into a profound consternation.

He had sent Marceline down to his country cottage on the banks of
the Marne, to which it was their habit to betake themselves at the
beginning of July; and Adolphe had gone down to the village inn, to
help her get it in order for their stay. Their absence left him freer
to prosecute his researches. Then on the morning of the anniversary
of his wedding-day he went down to join them at the cottage. He
had called it "Azure Waves Villa," in spite of the remonstrances of
Adolphe, who had urged that such a name was only suitable to a cottage
by the sea. Theophrastus had been firm in the matter because, he
declared, he had often been to Treport, and the sea was always green;
whereas, fishing for gudgeon in the Marne, he had frequently observed
that its waves were blue.

He found his wife and friend awaiting him eagerly on its threshold; and
as with the air of a favourite of the Regent, he complimented Marceline
on her charming appearance, he gracefully waved his green umbrella,
from which he seldom allowed himself to be parted, in the fashion in
which he believed the dandies waved their canes at the beginning of the
eighteenth century.

He found the household in the stress of the preparations for
the anniversary dinner, to which several of his friends in the
neighbourhood brought their wives to do honour to Theophrastus and
Marceline.

Still the favourite of the Regent, to the astonishment of Marceline and
Adolphe, he found a few gracious words of compliment for each guest.
Neither of them had ever seen him so shine as host before.

They dined in a tent in the garden; and the talk at once turned on
fishing, a sport to which they were all devoted; and they did their
best to be accurate about their exploits. M. Lopard had caught a
three-pound pike; old Mlle. Taburet complained bitterly that someone
had been fishing in her favourite pool; a third declared that the fish
were being overfed; and there was a long discussion on ground-bait.

Theophrastus said nothing: he suddenly found these good people too
middle-class for him. He would have liked to raise the level of the
conversation; and he would have preferred it to deal with the matters
which filled his fevered imagination.

Towards the end of dinner he found a way to set Adolphe talking of
ghosts. Then Madame Lopard told them of the extraordinary doings of
a somnambulist who lived near; and at once Adolphe explained the
phenomena of somnambulism according to the Spiritualistic theory,
and quoted Allan Kardec. Adolphe was never at a loss to explain
"phenomena." Then, at last, they came to the matter to which
Theophrastus was burning to bring them, the Transmigration of Souls.

Marceline observed that our reason rejected the hypothesis; and
Adolphe protested vigorously: "Nothing is lost in nature," he said
authoritatively. "Everything is transformed, souls and bodies alike.
The transmigration of souls with a view to their purification is a
belief which goes back to the remotest antiquity; and the philosophers
of all ages have been careful not to deny it."

"But if one came back into a body, one would know it," said Marceline.

"Not always, only sometimes," said Adolphe confidently.

"Sometimes? Is that so?" said Theophrastus quickly; and his heart began
to beat tumultuously.

"Oh, yes: there are instances--authentic instances," said Adolphe
emphatically. "Ptolemy Cæsarion, Cleopatra's son and King of Egypt
thirty years before Christ, recollected perfectly that he had been the
philosopher Pythagoras who lived six hundred years before him."

"Impossible!" cried the ladies; and the men smiled with an air of
superior wisdom.

"It's nothing to laugh at, gentlemen. It's the most serious subject in
the world," said Adolphe sternly. "The actual transformation of our
bodies which is the last word in Science, is in entire accord with the
theory of Reincarnation. What is this theory of transformation except
that living beings _transform themselves into one another_? Nature for
ever presents herself to us as a creative flame unceasingly perfecting
types, on her way to the attainment of an ideal which will be the final
crown of the Law of Progress. Since Nature has only one aim, what
she does for bodies, she does also for souls. I can assure you that
this is the case, for I have studied this question, which is the very
foundation of all sound Science."

None of the party understood Adolphe's discourse, a fact which filled
him with quiet pride; but they listened to him in an ecstasy; and he
was pleased to see that Theophrastus, as a rule so restive under such
discussions, was listening with the liveliest interest. It was an
attitude hardly to be wondered at in a man who was hearing that what
seemed a wild imagining of his delirium rested on a firm scientific
basis.

"The transmigration of souls was taught in India, the cradle of the
human race," Adolphe continued in his most professorial tone, delighted
to have caught the ear of the party. "Then it was taught in Egypt, then
in Greece by Pythagoras. Plato took the doctrine from him; and adduced
irrefutable proofs in his Phædo that souls do not pass into eternal
exile but return to animate new bodies."

"Oh, if we could only have proofs of a fact like that!" cried Madame
Sampic, the wife of the schoolmaster of Pont-aux-Dames, with enthusiasm.

"If we had, I shouldn't mind dying one bit," said old Mlle. Taburet,
who was in mortal fear of her approaching end.

"There _are_ proofs--irrefutable proofs," said Adolphe solemnly.
"There are two: one drawn from the general order of Nature, one
from human consciousness. Firstly, Nature is governed by the law of
contradictions, says Plato, meaning by that that when we see in her
bosom death succeed life we are compelled to believe that life succeeds
death. Is that clear to you?"

"Yes, yes," cried several of the guests, without understanding a word
he was saying.

"Moreover, Plato continues, since nothing can be born from nothing, if
the beings we see die were never to return to life, everything would
end by becoming absorbed in death, and Nature would be moving towards
an eternal sleep. Have I made this first proof clear?"

"Yes, yes: the second!" cried his fellow guests, quite untruthfully.

"Secondly," said Adolphe, growing absolutely pontifical, "when, after
having observed the general laws of the Universe, we descend into
the depths of our own being, we find the same dogma confirmed by the
fact of memory. 'To learn,' cries Plato to the Universe, 'To learn is
nothing else but to remember.' Since our soul learns, it is that it
remembers. And what does it remember if not that it has lived before,
and that it has lived in another body? 'Why should we not believe that
in quitting the body which it animates at the moment, it must animate
several others in succession?' I am quoting Plato word for word," said
Adolphe in a tone of ringing triumph.

"And Plato is a person to be reckoned with," said Theophrastus warmly.

"Charles Fourier says," said Adolphe, moving on to the modern, "Where
is the old man who does not desire not to be certain of carrying into
another life the experience he has acquired in this one? To assert
that this desire can never be realised is to admit that the Deity
would deceive us. We must then recognise that we have lived already,
before being what we are to-day, and that many more lives await us.
All these lives--Fourier adds with a precision for which we cannot
be sufficiently thankful--to the number of a hundred and ten are
distributed over five stages of unequal extent and cover a period of
eighty-one thousand years."

"Eighty-one thousand years! That's pretty filling!" interrupted M.
Lopard.

"We spend twenty-seven thousand of them on our planet and the other
fifty-four thousand elsewhere," explained Adolphe.

"And how long is it before we come back into another body?" asked
Madame Bache.

"At least two or three thousand years, if we are to believe Allan
Kardec, always supposing that we have not died a violent death. Then,
especially if one has been executed, one may be reincarnated at the end
of two hundred years," said Adolphe.

"That's it! They must have hanged me," said Theophrastus to himself.
"Or if they didn't hang a man of my quality, they beheaded me. All the
same," he went on to think, with a natural pride, "if these people
here knew that they were sitting with a favourite of the Regent, or
perhaps a Prince of Royal blood, how astonished and respectful they'd
be! But not a bit of it: they are merely saying to themselves, 'It's
Theophrastus Longuet, manufacturer of rubber stamps'; and that's enough
for them."

The advent of the two waiters with the champagne cut short the
dissertation of Adolphe; and though everyone had been deeply impressed
by it, now they only wished to be amused.

It was then that Marceline turned to Theophrastus and begged him to
sing the song with which he was wont to delight their ears at dessert
on each anniversary of their wedding-day. He had sung it on their
wedding-day itself; and thanks to its charm and freshness, it had been
a great success. It was Beranger's _Lisette_.

But what was the amazement of Marceline and all the guests, when
Theophrastus sprang to his feet, threw his napkin on the table, and
bawled to the mistress of the house:

"As you will, _Marie-Antoinette_! I can refuse you nothing!"

"Gracious goodness! _That voice of his has come back!_" gasped
Marceline.

The guests had not recovered from the shock when Theophrastus bawled
to an old French air, in a voice which none of them recognised as his,
his voice of the Conciergerie, bawled to the most select society from
Crécy-en-Brie to Lagny-Thorigny-Pomponne:

"Bullies all! In our snug cribs
We live like fighting-cocks:
On dainties rich we splash the dibbs,
And booze we never docks.
Then guzzle, cullies, and booze away
Till Gabriel's trump on Judgment Day!"

In spite of the richness of the rhyme, no applause followed the stanza.
The ladies did not clink their glasses with their knives; they stared
at Theophrastus with their eyes starting out of their heads; and the
eyes of Marceline projected furthest of all.

Theophrastus did not need any applause; like one possessed of a devil,
he bawled on:

"Bullies all! In our snug cribs
Dan Cupid loves to dance.
He brings to help us splash the dibbs
The prettiest silk in France.
Then guzzle, cullies, and booze away
Till Gabriel's trump on Judgment Day!"

In a final triumphant roar he repeated the last couplet and prolonged
the final note, his eyes on the sun, which was sinking over the edge
of the horizon, laid one hand on his heart, embraced "Nature" with a
sweeping gesture of the other, and bellowed:

"Then guzzle, cullies, and booze away
Till Gabriel's trump on Judgment Day!"

He sat down with an air of supreme content, and said proudly:

"_What do you think of that, Marie-Antoinette?_"

"Why do you call me Marie-Antoinette?" gasped the trembling Marceline.

"Because you're the prettiest of them all!" roared Theophrastus in
that awful voice. "I appeal to Madame la Maréchale de Boufflers, who's
a woman of taste! I appeal to all of you! And there's not one of you,
by the Pope's gullet, who'll dare to deny it! Neither the big Picard,
nor the Bourbonnais, nor the Burgundian, nor Sheep's-head, nor the
Cracksman, nor Parisian, nor the Provincial, nor the little Breton,
nor the Feather, nor Patapon, nor Pint-pot, nor St. James's Gate, nor
Gastelard, nor Iron-arm, nor Black-mug, nor even Fancy Man!"

Since Theophrastus had on his right old Mlle. Taburet, he prodded her
in the ribs by way of emphasis, an action which nearly made her faint.

No one dared budge; his flaming eye chained them to their chairs; and
leaning affectionately towards Mlle. Taburet, he pointed to the gasping
Marceline, and said:

"Look, Mlle. Taburet, aren't I right? Who can compare with her?
Pretty-Milkmaid, of Pussycat? Or even Blanche, the Bustler? Or
Belle-Hélène who keeps the Harp tavern?"

He turned towards Adolphe.

"Here--you--old Easy-Going!" he said with a terrifying energy.
"Let's have your opinion. Look at Marie-Antoinette a moment! By the
Sucking-pig! there's not one to compare with her: not Jenny Venus, the
flower-seller of the Palais-Royal, nor Marie Leroy, nor mother Salomon,
the pretty coffee-house-keeper of the Temple, nor Jenny Bonnefoy
_who's just married Veunier who keeps the Pont-Marie café_. Not one of
them, I tell you! Not one of them! The Slapper, Manon de Versailles,
Fat-Poulteress, the Lock, Cow-with-the-Baskets, or the Bastille!"

With a bound Theophrastus was on the table; and the crockery round him
smashed into a thousand pieces. He caught up a glass and bellowed:

"I drink to the queen of the nymphs! Marie-Antoinette Neron!"

He crushed the glass in his hands, cutting them in twenty places, and
bowed to the company.

But the company had fled.