Swiftly the words of the young scholar penetrated all the little groups of Parisians. _Une taupe!_ Lady and gentleman, girl and boy, mason and grocer, one after the other took up that goodly revelation. “_C’est une taupe!_” Some repeated it a little sadly, as if it were a mistake, or at least an indelicacy, on the part of the _taupe_ not to have been something else. Others repeated it with exquisite gayety, as if a _taupe_ were the one object of joy the world had waited for, until then. Still others repeated it without passion and without surprise, as if a _taupe_ were no more than should have been expected at such a time. But in one way or another, they all repeated it. _C’est une taupe._ Even those who had never had so much as a cornerwise glance at the _limace_ went their ways, saying, with a fine discriminating wave of the hand, “_une taupe_.” Indeed, not having seen the _limace_, they were naturally far more confident than those who had really gone quite near to that brown half-moon on the green leaf, and touched it with twigs. The distribution of knowledge is a moving spectacle, is it not? My friend who was beside me in that lovely wood, with the blue sky above the waving branches, and with the flower-like children springing up from the grass, and the autumn-leaf grandmothers walking abroad with baskets for the _déjeuner_, suddenly asked me why I was laughing like that, and the tears running down my cheeks. “You do not know why!” I answered. “Oh, surely if you know anything at all, you must know! It is because I can see, at this moment, this same spectacle shaping itself everywhere on our planet; yes, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, on Capricornus and on Cancer, and even in the Equatorial belt where the lazy peoples live. Everywhere, everywhere on this round globe of ours, there is a poor _limace_ among the green leaves, and no one knows what she is; but everywhere there is a good old grandmother, pushing forward a pale little Pierre with a bay-window brow, to tell the world, ‘_C’est une taupe._’ And the world listens, and repeats, and so becomes wise.”