"My children, the phial will be on a stool beside the bed, wrapped in linen, corked with virgin wax. You will at once break the neck of the phial. While one of you opens my teeth with the point of a knife, another will pour the elixir, not drop by drop but in a thin trickle, which should flow down to the bottom of my throat. Some minutes will pass. Then little by little life will return. The beating of my heart will grow quicker. My breast will rise and fall; and my eyes will open.
"Perhaps, my children, it will be necessary for you to speak in low voices, and not light up the room with too bright a light, that my eyes and ears may not suffer any shock. Perhaps on the other hand I shall only see you and hear you indistinctly, with enfeebled organs. I do not know. I foresee a period of torpor and uneasiness, during which I shall have to collect my thoughts as one does on awaking from sleep. Moreover I shall make no haste about it, and I beg you not to try to quicken my efforts. Quiet days and a nourishing diet will insensibly restore me to the sweetness of life.
"Have no fear at all that I shall need to live at your expense. Unknown to my relations I brought back from the Indies four diamonds of extraordinary size, which I have hidden in a hiding-place there is no finding. They will easily suffice to keep me in luxury befitting my station.
"Since I have to take into consideration that I may have forgotten the secret hiding-place of the diamonds, I have set forth the secret in some lines enclosed herein in a second envelope bearing the designation 'The Codicil.'
"Of this codicil I have not breathed a word, not even to my servant Geoffrey and his wife. If out of human weakness they bequeath to their children an account revealing my secret history, they will not be able to reveal the hiding-place of those four marvelous diamonds, which they have often admired and which they will seek in vain after I am gone.
"The enclosed envelope then will be handed over to me as soon as I return to life. In the event—to my thinking impossible, but which none the less your interests compel me to take into account—of destiny having betrayed me and of your finding no trace of me, you will yourselves open the envelope and learning the whereabouts of the hiding-place, take possession of the diamonds. Then and thereafter I declare that the ownership of the diamonds is vested in those of my descendants who shall present the gold medal, and that no person shall have the right to intervene in the fair partition of them, on which they shall agree among themselves, and I beg them to make that partition themselves as their consciences shall direct.
"I have said what I have to say, my children. I am about to enter into the silence and await your coming. I do not doubt that you will come from all the corners of the earth at the imperious summons of the gold medal. Sprung from the same stock, be as brothers and sisters among yourselves. Approach with serious minds him who sleeps, and deliver him from the bonds which keep him in the kingdom of darkness.
"Written by my own hand, in perfect health of mind and body, this day, the 12th of July, 1721. Delivered under my hand and seal.
"Jean-Pierre-Augustin de la Roche, Marquis de ——"
Maître Delarue was silent, bent nearer to the paper, and murmured: