"Your name?" asked Dubois, interrupting the good man's compliments.
"Jean Buvat, at your service."
"You are—?"
"An employé at the library."
"And you have some revelations to make to me concerning Spain?"
"That is to say, monseigneur—This is how it is. As my office work leaves me six hours in the evening and four in the morning, and as Heaven has blessed me with a very good handwriting, I make copies."
"Yes, I understand," said Dubois; "and some one has given you suspicious papers to copy, so you have brought these suspicious papers to me, have you not?"
"In this roll, monseigneur, in this roll," said Buvat, extending it toward Dubois.
Dubois made a single bound from his chair to Buvat, took the roll, and sat down at a desk, and in a turn of the hand, having torn off the string and the wrapper, found the papers in question. The first on which he lighted were in Spanish; but as Dubois had been sent twice to Spain, and knew something of the language of Calderon and Lopez de Vega, he saw at the first glance how important these papers were. Indeed, they were neither more nor less than the protestation of the nobility, the list of officers who requested commissions under the king of Spain, and the manifesto prepared by the Cardinal de Polignac and the Marquis de Pompadour to rouse the kingdom. These different documents were addressed directly to Philip V.; and a little note—which Dubois recognized as Cellamare's hand writing—announced that the denouement of the conspiracy was near at hand; he informed his Catholic majesty, from day to day, of all the important events which could advance or retard the scheme. Then came, finally, that famous plan of the conspirators which we have already given to our readers, and which—left by an oversight among the papers which had been translated into Spanish—had opened Buvat's eyes. Near the plan, in the good man's best writing, was the copy which he had begun to make, and which was broken off at the words, "Act thus in all the provinces."
Buvat had followed all the working of Dubois's face with a certain anxiety; he had seen it pass from astonishment to joy, then from joy to impassibility. Dubois, as he continued to read, had passed, successively, one leg over the other, had bitten his lips, pinched the end of his nose, but all had been utterly untranslatable to Buvat, and at the end of the reading he understood no more from the face of the archbishop than he had understood at the end of the copy from the Spanish original. As to Dubois, he saw that this man had come to furnish him with the beginning of a most important secret, and he was meditating on the best means of making him furnish the end also. This was the signification of the crossed legs, the bitten lips, and the pinched nose. At last he appeared to have taken his resolution. A charming benevolence overspread his countenance, and turning toward the good man, who had remained standing respectfully—