"in the way and smelt bad." Neither could Françoise have written it. Her
awkward handwriting, her sparkling flood of words and details, and her
ignorance of the simplest rules of spelling, make it impossible. Nor could
Suzanne have done it. She wrote and spelled no better at fifty-nine than
Françoise at forty-three. Nor could any one have imposed it on either of
the sisters. So, then, we find no intention to deceive, either early or
recent. I translated the manuscript, it went to the magazine, and I sat
down to eat, drink, and revel, never dreaming that the brazen water-gates
of my Babylon were standing wide open.

For all this time two huge, glaring anachronisms were staring me, and half
a dozen other persons, squarely in the face, and actually escaping our
notice by their serene audacity. But hardly was the pie--I mean the
magazine--opened when these two birds began to sing. Wasn't
that--interesting? Of course Louis de la Houssaye, who in 1786 "had lately
come from San Domingo," had _not_ "been fighting the insurgents"--who did
not revolt until four or five years afterward! And of course the old
count, who so kindly left the family group that was bidding Madelaine de
Livilier good-bye, was not the Prime Minister Maurepas, who was _not_
"only a few months returned from exile," and who was _not_ then "at the
pinnacle of royal favor"; for these matters were of earlier date, and this
"most lovable old man in the world" wasn't any longer in the world at all,
and had not been for eight years. He was dead and buried.

And so, after all, fraudulent intent or none, _this_ manuscript, just as
it is, could never have been written by Alix. On "this 22d of August,
1795," she could not have perpetrated such statements as these two. Her
memory of persons and events could not have been so grotesquely at fault,
nor could she have hoped so to deceive any one. The misstatements are of
later date, and from some one to whom the two events were historical. But