No doubt! But, at least, let them be permitted to get a painter to make a drawing of it.
"Be it so, gentlemen."
"Between ourselves, is it not?" said Bouvard, "under the seal of confession."
The ecclesiastic, smiling, reassured them with a gesture.
It was not he whom they feared, but rather Larsoneur. When he would be passing through Chavignolles, he would feel a hankering after the bowl; and his chatterings might reach the ears of the Government. Out of prudence they kept it hidden in the bakehouse, then in the arbour, in the trunk, in a cupboard. Gorju was tired of dragging it about.
The possession of such a rare piece of furniture bound them the closer to the Celticism of Normandy.
Its sources were Egyptian. Séez, in the department of the Orne, is sometimes written Saïs, like the city of the Delta. The Gauls swore by the bull, an idea derived from the bull Apis. The Latin name of Bellocastes, which was that of the people of Bayeux, comes from Beli Casa, dwelling, sanctuary of Belus—Belus and Osiris, the same divinity!
"There is nothing," says Mangou de la Londe, "opposed to the idea that druidical monuments existed near Bayeux." "This country," adds M. Roussel, "is like the country in which the Egyptians built the temple of Jupiter Ammon."
So then there was a temple in which riches were shut up. All the Celtic monuments contain them.
"In 1715," relates Dom Martin, "one Sieur Heribel exhumed in the vicinity of Bayeux, several argil vases full of bones, and concluded (in accordance with tradition and authorities which had disappeared) that this place, a necropolis, was the Mount Faunus in which the Golden Calf is buried."