Maurice Leblanc

“ There was only one thing that mattered:
“Massignac, have you read Benjamin Prevotelle's report?”
“Yes.”
“Does it agree with the facts? Does it agree with my uncle's account, the one which you've read?”
He shrugged his shoulders:
“What business is that of yours? What business is it of anybody's? Do I keep the pictures to myself? You know I don't. On the contrary, I'm trying to show them to everybody and honestly to earn the money which they pay me. What more do they want?” ”

“ To see a fifteenth-century page and damsel kissing each other on the lips!
To see, as we saw immediately afterwards, a Greek hill! To see the Acropolis standing against its sky of two thousand years ago, with its houses and gardens, its palm-trees, its lanes, its vestibules and temples, the Parthenon, not in ruins, but in all its splendour and perfection!
A host of statues surround it. Men and women climb its stairways. And these men and women are Athenians of the time of Pericles or Demosthenes!
They come and go in all directions. They talk together. Then they drift away. ”

“ I tell yon, Victorien Beaugrand, Noel Dorgeroux's secret will perish at my death. If I die, it dies: I've taken my oath on it.”
* * * * When Theodore Massignac, a few minutes later, moved towards his seat, he no longer wore his former air of a lion-tamer entering a cage, but rather the aspect of a hunted animal which is startled by the least sound and trembles at the approach of the man with the whip. But the chuckers-out were there, wearing their ushers' chains and looking as fierce and aggressive as ever. ”

“ A group passes and moves away, leaving behind it a man and woman who stop suddenly, glance around them and kiss each other fervently. And we see, underneath the veil in which the woman's forehead is shrouded, two great, black eyes whose lids flutter like wings, eyes which open, close, laugh and weep. ”

“ There were barely a few cries of vehement protest uttered by experts who felt exasperated by the boldness of the essay even more than by the gaps occurring in it. The great mass of the public saw in all this not a theory but a fact and accepted it as such with the faith of true believers confronted with the divine truth. Every one contributed his own proof as yet one more stone added to the edifice. ”

“ In this late period of the world's existence, we were beholding the life of human beings of the fifteenth century. They were not repeating for our entertainment actions which had been performed before. ”

“ Well, on the morning of the eleventh day after the date of Benjamin Prevotelle's essay, that is to say, the 27th of May, the newspapers printed a note signed by Theodore Massignac in which he announced that, in the late afternoon of that same day, the third exhibition in the Yard would take place under his own direction. ”