the manuscript is all in one simple, undisguised, feminine handwriting,
and with no interlineation save only here and there the correction of a
miswritten word.

Now in translating madame's "Voyage de ma Grandmère," I noticed something
equivalent to an interlineation, but in her own writing like all the rest,
and added in a perfectly unconcealed, candid manner, at the end of a
paragraph near the close of the story. It struck me as an innocent gloss
of the copyist, justified in her mind by some well-credited family
tradition. It was this: "Just as we [Françoise and Alix] were parting, she
[Alix] handed me the story of her life." I had already called my friend's
attention to the anachronisms, and she was in keen distress, because
totally unable to account for them. But as I further pondered them, this
gloss gained new significance and I mentioned it. My new inquiry flashed
light upon her aged memory. She explained at once that, to connect the two
stories of Françoise and Alix, she had thought it right to impute these
few words to Françoise rather than for mere exactness to thrust a detailed
explanation of her own into a story hurrying to its close. My question
called back an incident of long ago and resulted first in her rummaging a
whole day among her papers, and then in my receiving the certificate of a
gentleman of high official standing in Louisiana that, on the 10th of last
April (1889), this lady, in his presence, took from a large trunk of
written papers, variously dated and "appearing to be perfectly genuine," a
book of memoranda from which, writes he, "I copy the following paragraph
written by Madame S. de la Houssaye herself in the middle of the book, on
page 29." Then follows in French:

June 20, 1841.--M. Gerbeau has dined here again. What a singular story he
tells me. We talked of my grandmother and Madame Carpentier, and what does
M. Gerbeau tell me but that Alix had not finished her history when my