Their entire absence from this manuscript of sixty-eight pages, abounding
in conversations, meant either age or cunning pretense. But would a
pretender carry his or her cunning to the extreme of fortifying the
manuscript in every possible way against the sallowing touch of time, lay
it away in a trunk of old papers, lie down and die without mentioning it,
and leave it for some one in the second or third generation afterward to
find? I turned the leaves once more, and lo! one leaf that had had a large
corner torn off had lost that much of its text; it had been written upon
before it was torn; while on another torn leaf, for there are two, the
writing reads--as you shall see--uninterruptedly around the torn edge; the
writing has been done after the corner was torn off. The two rents,
therefore, must have occurred at different times; for the one which
mutilates the text is on the earlier page and surely would not have been
left so by the author at the time of writing it, but only by some one
careless of it, and at some time between its completion and the manifestly
later date, when it was so carefully bestowed in its old-fashioned silken
case and its inner wrapper of black paper. The manuscript seemed genuine.
Maybe the name De Morainville is not, but was a convenient fiction of Alix
herself, well understood as such by Françoise and Suzanne. Everything
points that way, as was suggested at once by Madame Sidonie de la Houssaye
--There! I have let slip the name of my Creole friend, and can only pray
her to forgive me! "Tout porte à le croire" (Everything helps that
belief), she writes; although she also doubts, with reason, I should say,
the exhaustive completeness of those lists of the guillotined. "I recall,"
she writes in French, "that my husband has often told me the two uncles of
his father, or grandfather, were guillotined in the Revolution; but though
search was made by an advocate, no trace of them was found in any
records."

An assumed name need not vitiate the truth of the story; but discoveries