But 'the cheaters do not take so much pains every day!' The pains would be great indeed, and those who infer fraud little think what prodigies they are invoking. The accusation is an absurdity which verges on silliness, and its silliness removes its sting. One does not take offense at things like that. But come now, let us suppose for the moment that Valleyres were peopled with disciples of Bosco, that prestidigitation were generally practised there, and that it had been thrust under our very eyes for five months, and under the eyes of numerous and very suspicious witnesses without a single case of perfidy having been pointed out. We have so well concealed our game that we have invented a secret telegraphic code for the experiment of reading numbers, a particular turn of the finger for moving the most enormous masses, a method of gradually lifting tables that we do not seem to touch. We are all liars, all; for we have been mutually watching each other for a long time now, and do not denounce anybody. Nay, more, the contagion of our vices is so swift to take that, as soon as we admit a stranger, a hostile witness, into the chain, he becomes our accomplice; he voluntarily closes his eyes to the transmission of signals, to muscular efforts, to the repeated and prolonged suspicious actions of his next neighbors in the chain! Well and good; suppose we grant all that, we shall not have got farther along for that. It will still remain to be explained why our cheaters sometimes do nothing at the very moment when it would be to their interest to succeed. It has happened, indeed, that a certain sitting at which we had many witnesses and a great desire to convince turned out to be a mediocre one. Such and such another, under the same conditions, was, on the contrary, a brilliant success. There you have real and important inequalities, and they dare to talk to us of muscular action and of fraud.