“This Countess de Gromance,” said the archivist, “was a Chapon. There was never but one Chapon heard of—her father, the most arrant skinflint in the province. But I have hunted up the record of the Gromance family, who belong to the lesser nobility of the place. There was a Demoiselle Cécile de Gromance who in 1815 gave birth to a child by a Cossack father. That will make a capital subject for an article in a local paper. I am writing a regular series of them.” M. Mazure spoke the truth: every day, from sunrise to sunset, alone in his dusty garret under the roof of the prefecture, he eagerly ransacked the six hundred and thirty-seven thousand pigeonholes which were there huddled together. His gloomy hatred of his fellow-townsmen drove him to this research, merely in the hope that he would succeed in unearthing some scandalous facts about the most respected families in the neighbourhood. Amid piles of ancient parchments and papers stamped by the registrars of the last two centuries with the arms of six kings, two emperors and three republics he used to sit, laughing in the midst of the clouds of dust, as he stirred up the evidences, now half eaten up by mice and worms, of bygone crimes and sins long since expiated. As they followed the windings of the Tintelleries, it was with the tale of these cruel revelations that he continued to entertain M. Bergeret, a man who always cultivated an attitude of particular indulgence towards our forefathers’ faults, and who was inquisitive merely in the matter of their habits and customs. Mazure had, or so he averred, discovered in the archives a certain Terremondre who, being a terrorist and president of a local club of Sans-Culottes in 1793, had changed his Christian names from Nicolas-Eustache to Marat-Peuplier. Instantly Mazure hastened to supply M. Jean de Terremondre, his colleague in the Archæological Society, who had gone over to the monarchical and clerical party, with full information touching this forgotten forbear of his, this Marat-Peuplier Terremondre, who had actually written a hymn to Saint Guillotine. He had also unearthed a great-great-uncle of the diocesan Vicar-General, a Sieur de Goulet, or rather, more precisely, a Goulet-Trocard as he signed himself, who, as an army contractor, was condemned to penal servitude in 1812 for having supplied glandered horseflesh instead of beef. The documents relating to this trial he had published in the most rabid journal in the department. M. Mazure promised still more terrible revelations about the Laprat family, revelations full of cases of incest; about the Courtrai family, with one of its members branded for high treason in 1814; about the Dellion family, whose wealth had been gained by gambling in wheat; about the Quatrebarbe family, whose ancestors, two stokers, a man and a woman, were hanged by lynch law on a tree on Duroc Hill at the time of the consulate. In fact, as late as 1860, old people