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 taken everything everything  everything  everything! Even the Louis XVI cruet."

While Madame was looking at the boxes as if she were looking at a dead child, Monsieur, scratching his neck, and rolling haggard eyes, moaned persistently in the far-away voice of a demented person:

"Name of a dog! Ah! name of a dog! Name of a dog of name of a dog!"

And Joseph, too, with atrocious grimaces, was exclaiming:

"The cruet of Louis XVI! The cruet of Louis XVI! Oh! the bandits!"

Then there was a minute of tragic silence, a long minute of prostration,—that silence of death, that prostration of beings and things, which follows the fracas of a terrible downfall, the thunder of a great cataclysm. And the lantern, swinging in Joseph's hands, cast a red, trembling, sinister gleam over the whole scene, over the dead faces and the empty boxes.

I had come down, in response to Joseph's call, at the same time as the masters. In presence of this disaster, and in spite of the prodigious comicality of these faces, my first feeling was one of compassion. It seemed to me that this misfortune fell upon me too, and that I was one of the family, sharing its trials and sorrows. I should have liked