Thus reassured, he became its purchaser. It lies before me now, in an
inner wrapper of queer old black paper, beside its little tight-fitting
bag, or case of a kind of bright, large-flowered silken stuff not made in
these days, and its outer wrapper of discolored brief-paper; a pretty
little document of sixty-eight small pages in a feminine hand, perfect in
its slightly archaic grammar, gracefully composed, and, in spite of its
flimsy yellowed paper, as legible as print: "Histoire d'Alix de
Morainville écrite à la Louisiane ce 22 Aout 1795. Pour mes chères amies,
Suzanne et Françoise Bossier."

One day I told the story to Professor Charles Eliot Norton of Harvard
University. He generously offered to see if he could find the name of the
Count de Morainville on any of the lists of persons guillotined during the
French Revolution. He made the search, but wrote, "I am sorry to say that
I have not been able to find it either in Prudhomme, 'Dictionnaire des
Individues envoyés à la Mort judiciairement, 1789-1796,' or in the list
given by Wallon in the sixth volume of his very interesting 'Histoire du
Tribunal Revolutionnaire de Paris.' Possibly he was not put to death in
Paris," etc. And later he kindly wrote again that he had made some hours'
further search, but in vain.

Here was distress. I turned to the little manuscript roll of which I had
become so fond, and searched its pages anew for evidence of either
genuineness or its opposite. The wrapper of black paper and the
close-fitting silken bag had not been sufficient to keep it from taking on
the yellowness of age. It was at least no modern counterfeit. Presently I
noticed the total absence of quotation marks from its passages of
conversation. Now, at the close of the last century, the use of quotation
marks was becoming general, but had not become universal and imperative.