"Clementine Pichon."
"Gracious Heavens! My keys! Where are my keys? I'm sure I put them in my pocket! Clementine Pichon! M. Langevin! It's impossible! My senses are forsaking me! Come, my child, bestir yourself! The happiness of your whole life is concerned. Where did you poke my keys? Ah! Here they are!"
Fougas bent over to Clementine's ear, and said:
"Is she subject to these attacks? One, would suppose that the poor old girl had lost her head!"
But Virginie Sambucco had already opened a little rosewood secretary. Her unerring glance discovered in a file of papers, a sheet yellow with age.
"I've got it!" said she with a cry of joy. "Marie Clementine Pichon, legitimate daughter of August Pichon, hotel keeper, rue des Merlettes, in this town of Nancy; married June 10th, 1814, to Joseph Langevin, military sub-commissary. Is it surely she, Monsieur? Dare to say it isn't she!"
"Well! But how do you happen to have my family papers?"
"Poor Clementine! And you accuse her of unfaithfulness! You do not understand then that you had been taken for dead! That she supposed herself a widow without having been a wife; that—"
"It's all right! It's all right! I forgive her. Where is she? I want to see her, to embrace her, to tell her—"
"She is dead, Monsieur! She died three months after she was married,"