Among other things there was included: a private letter of Alexander the Great addressed to Aristotle; a letter of Cleopatra to Julius Cæsar, informing the Roman Dictator that their son “Cesarion” was getting on very well; a missive of Lazarus to St. Peter; also a lengthy epistle addressed to Lazarus by Mary Magdalen. It should be added that the letters were written in French and in what might be styled an eighteenth-century jargon, that Alexander addressed Aristotle as _Mon Ami_ and Cleopatra scribbled to Cæsar: _Notre fils Cesarion va bien_. Lazarus, no less a scholar in the Gallic idiom, and to whom, maybe, a miraculous resurrection had prompted a new personality, writes to St. Peter in the spirit of a rhetorician and a prig, speaking of Cicero’s oratory and Cæsar’s writings, getting excited and anathematic on Druidic rites and their cruel habit _de sacrifier des hommes saulœvaiges_. Mary Magdalen, who begins her letter with a _mon très aimé frère Lazarus, ce que me mandez de Petrus l’apostre de notre doux Jesus_, is supposed to be writing from Marseilles and thus would appear to be the only one out of the many who can logically indulge in French, the _jargon-bouillabaisse_ that Vrain-Lucas lent to the gallant array of his personages. [Illustration: _Photo_] [_Alinari_ CHILD. By Donatello, whose taste in statuary was chiefly formed in Rome.] After such a practical joke played on the excellent good faith of M. Chasles, some of the other autographs seem tame. The package, however, also contained scraps jotted down by Alcibiades and Pericles, a full confession of Judas Iscariot’s crime written by himself to Mary Magdalen before passing the rope round his neck; a letter of Pontius Pilate addressed to Tiberius expressing his sorrow for the death of Christ. Other astounding pieces of this now famous collection were: a passport signed by Vercingetorix, a poem of Abelard and some love-letters addressed by Laura to Petrarch, as well as many other historical documents down to a manuscript of Pascal and an exchange of letters between the French scientist and Newton on the laws of gravitation, the Frenchman claiming the discovery as his own. The latter manuscript caused a memorable polemic between the savants of London and Paris, a regular tournament of clever arguing among the scholars of the two countries, which finally led to the discovery of the huge fraud of which M. Chasles was the assigned but unresigned victim.