tell me, then, M. Pierre, by what means you became possessed of
this manuscript, and who wrote it?"

"It is a natural question, monsieur," he answered after a short pause,
"and I have no good reason for withholding the reply, since every
one who was personally concerned in the tragedy has long been dead.
You must know, then, that in my younger days I was cure to a little
parish of about two hundred souls in the province of Berry. Many
years ago there came to this village a strange old woman of whom
nobody in the place had the least knowledge. She took and rented
a small hovel on the borders of a wood about two miles from our
church, and, except on market days, when she came to the village
for her weekly provisions, none of my parishioners ever held any
intercourse with her. She was evidently insane, and although she
did harm to nobody, yet she often caused considerable alarm and
wonderment by her eccentric behavior. It is, as you must know,
often the case in intermittent mania that its victims are insane
upon some particular subject, some point upon which their frenzy
always betrays itself,--even when, with regard to other matters,
they conduct themselves like ordinary people. Now this old woman's
weakness manifested itself in a wild and continual desire to copy
every written document she saw. If, on her market-day visits to
the village, any written notice upon the churchdoors chanced to
catch her eye as she passed, she would immediately pause, draw out
pencil and paper from her pocket, and stand muttering to herself
until she had closely transcribed the whole of the placard, when
she would quietly return the copy to her pocket and go on her way.

"Thinking it my duty, as pastor of the village, to make myself
acquainted with this poor creature, who had thus become one of my