However, in spite of all our efforts, we could not, at the finish, help bursting out laughing in the faces of MM.

Debienne and Poligny, who, seeing us pass straight from the gloomiest state of mind to one of the most insolent merriment, acted as though they thought that we had gone mad.
"The joke became a little tedious; and Richard asked half-seriously and half in jest: "'But, after all, what does this ghost of yours want ?' "M.

Poligny went to his desk and returned with a copy of the memorandum-book.

The memorandum-book begins with the well-known words saying that 'the management of the Opera shall give to the performance of the National Academy of Music the splendor that becomes the first lyric stage in France' and ends with Clause 98, which says that the privilege can be withdrawn if the manager infringes the conditions stipulated in the memorandum-book.

This is followed by the conditions, which are four in number.
"The copy produced by M.Poligny was written in black ink and exactly similar to that in our possession, except that, at the end, it contained a paragraph in red ink and in a queer, labored handwriting, as though it had been produced by dipping the heads of matches into the ink, the writing of a child that has never got beyond the down-strokes and has not learned to join its letters.