[A Mummer’s Tale by Anatole France]@TWC D-Link book
A Mummer’s Tale

CHAPTER XVIII
9/11

Tell me at least what you are looking for.

If it's the chocolate, it is on the middle shelf next to the silver sugar-basin." But Felicie had seized upon a packet of photographs, which she was rapidly turning over.

Her impatient fingers rejected Madame Doulce, bedecked with lace, Fagette, radiant, her hair dissolving in its own brilliance; Tony Meyer, with close-set eyes and a nose drooping over his lips; Pradel, with his flourishing beard; Trublet, bald and snub-nosed; Monsieur Bondois, with timorous eye and straight nose set above a heavy moustache.

Although not in a mood to bestow any attention upon Monsieur Bondois, she gave him a passing glance of hostility, and by chance let a drop of candle-grease disfigure his nose.
Madame Nanteuil, who was now wide awake, could make nothing of her proceedings.
"Felicie, why on earth are you poking about in my wardrobe like that ?" Felicie, who at last held the photograph for which she had sought so assiduously, responded only by a cry of fierce delight and flew from the chair, taking with her her dead friend, and, inadvertently, Monsieur Bondois as well.
Returning to the drawing-room she crouched down by the fireplace, and made a fire of paper, into which she cast Chevalier's three photographs.
She watched them blazing, and when the three bits of cardboard, twisted and blackened, had flown up the chimney, and neither shape nor substance was left, she breathed freely.

She really believed, this time, that she had deprived the jealous dead man of the material of his apparitions, and had freed herself from the dreaded obsession.
On picking up her candlestick she saw Monsieur Bondois, whose nose had disappeared beneath a round blob of white wax.


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