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The Sixth Day: Narcisse

I was greatly upset by this news, but I was interested, and in a measure consoled, to find an enclosure amongst the other papers, an envelope addressed to me in the handwriting of the condemned man. This voix d'outre tombe, I rejoice to say, confides to me the secret of that incomparable sauce of his, a secret which I feared might be buried with Narcisse in the prison ditch."

The Marchesa sighed as she listened. The recipe of the sauce was safe indeed, but she knew by experience how wide might be the gulf between the actual work of an artist and the product of another hand guided by his counsels, let the hand be ever so dexterous, and the counsels ever so clear. "Will it be too much," she said, "to ask you to give us the details of this painful tragedy?" "It will not," Sir John replied reflectively. "The last words of many a so-called genius have been enshrined in literature: probably no one will ever know the parting objurgation of Narcisse.

I will endeavour, however, to give you some notion as to what occurred, from the budget I have just read. I fear the tragedy was a squalid one. Madame, the victim, was elderly, unattractive in person, exacting in temper, and the owner of considerable wealth-at least, this is what came out at the trial. It was one of those tangles in which a fatal dénouement is inevitable; and, if this had not come through Mademoiselle Sidonie, it would have come through somebody else.