"Horace, be quiet. Sit up straight in your chair. Put your hand down."
She looked Horace over critically, and then began to read.
"'The old parliamentarians were triumphant; at the same time as Abbé Terray, Chancellor Maupeou was disgraced, and the judicial system he had founded fell with him. Unpopular from the first, the Maupeou Parliament had remained in the nation's eyes the image of absolute power corrupted and corrupting. The suit between Beaumarchais and Councillor Goëzman—'"
"Oh, Aunt, I don't want—"
"Horace, if you are not still this instant, I will put you to bed!"
Horace's articulations dissolved into snuffles and whines; we both hitched and wriggled in our chairs, and the reading went on. We heard what Chancellor Maupeou said to the Duke de La Vrillière, and what M. Turgot wrote to Louis XVI,—if a process in which the brain took almost no part can be called hearing. These personages were strangers to me, but Horace greeted them as familiar enemies. I judged that he knew and hated them of old time.
An hour passed, a long hot hour. M. de Malesherbes had gone the way of Turgot, and Horace and I were reduced to a mere coma. Then the book was closed, and we were told that we might return to our turtles.
We did so with profound joy, and Horace, seeing the Tiltons' cat hurrying over the fence, remarked that she was Chancellor Maupeou, and threw a green apple at her.