So they kept it up and down alternately like see-sawing, to an intonation; and be it remarked, by the way, that in French such a monotonous bore is known as a _scie_ or saw, as may be read in my romance in the French tongue entitled _Le Lutin du Chateau_, which was, I regret to say, refused by Hachette the publisher on account of its freedom from strait-laced, blue-nosed, Puritanical conventionalism, albeit he praised its literary merit and style, as did sundry other French scholars, if I may say it--who should not! I saw that something must be done; so, rising, I waved my glove, and there was dead silence. Then I began at the top of my voice, in impassioned style in German, an address about matters and things in general, intermingled with insane quotations from Latin, Slavonian, anything. A change came o'er the spirit of the dream of my auditors, till at last they "took," and gave me three cheers. I had _sold_ the house! There was in the Rue de la Harpe a house called the Hotel de Luxembourg. It was the fragment of a very old palace which had borne that name. It had still a magnificent Renaissance staircase, which bore witness to its former glory. Washington Irving, in one of his earlier tales, describes this very house and the rooms which I occupied in it so accurately, that I think he must have dwelt there. He tells that a student once, during the Revolution, finding a young lady in the street, took her home with him to that house. She had a black ribbon round her neck. He twitched it away, when--off fell her head. She had been guillotined, and revived by sorcery.