I took it out of his hands. It was an old guide-book of the year 1871.

“What’s the good of that?” I said as I handed it back to him. “It’s too old. It’s of no use.”

He protested that it was—that, besides, recent guide-books were much too dear, and that for all he should do with it the maps of this one were good enough. I don’t attempt to quote his words, which would lose their savour without the extraordinarily vulgar accent with which he said them and which was all the more amusing because his sentences were not turned without a certain elegance.

This episode must be very much shortened. Precision in the reader’s imagination should be obtained not by accumulating details but by two or three touches put in exactly the right places. I expect for that matter that it would be a better plan to make the boy tell the story himself; his point of view is of more signification than mine. He is flattered and at the same time made uncomfortable by the attention I pay him. But the weight of my look makes him deviate a little from his own real direction. A personality which is over-tender and still too young to be conscious of itself takes shelter behind an attitude. Nothing is more difficult to observe than creatures in the period of formation. One ought to look at them only sideways—in profile.

The youngster suddenly declared that what he liked best was geography! I suspected that an instinct for vagabonding was concealed behind this liking.

“You’d like to go to those parts?” I asked.

“Wouldn’t I?” he answered, shrugging his shoulders.

The idea crossed my mind that he was unhappy at home. I asked him if he lived with his parents. “Yes.” Didn’t he get on with them? He protested rather lukewarmly that he did. He seemed afraid that he had given himself away by what he had just said. He added:

“Why do you ask that?”

“Oh, for nothing,” I answered, and then, touching the yellow ribbon in his buttonhole, “What’s that?”

“It’s a ribbon. Can’t you see?”

My questions evidently annoyed him. He turned towards me abruptly and almost vindictively, and in a jeering, insolent voice of which I should never have thought him capable and which absolutely turned me sick:

“I say … do you often go about picking up schoolboys?”

Then as I was stammering out some kind of a confused answer, he opened the satchel he was carrying under his arm to slip his purchase into it. It held his lesson books and one or two copy-books, all covered with blue paper. I took one out; it was a history note-book. Its small owner had written his name on it in large letters. My heart gave a jump as I recognized that it was my nephew’s:

GEORGE MOLINIER.

(Bernard’s heart gave a jump too as he read these lines and the whole story began to interest him prodigiously.)

It will be difficult to get it accepted that the character who stands for me in The Counterfeiters can have kept on good terms with his sister and yet not have known her children. I have always had the greatest difficulty in tampering with real facts. Even to alter the colour of a person’s hair seems to me a piece of cheating which must lessen the verisimilitude of the truth. Everything hangs together and I always feel such a subtle interdependence between all the facts life offers me, that it seems to me impossible to change a single one without modifying the whole. And yet I can hardly explain that this boy’s mother is only my half-sister by a first marriage of my father’s; that I never saw her during the whole time my parents were alive; that we were brought into contact by business relating to the property they left.… All this is indispensable, however, and I don’t see what else I can invent in order to avoid being indiscreet. I knew that my half-sister had three sons; I had met the eldest—a medical student—but I had caught only a sight even of him, as he has been obliged to interrupt his studies on account of a threatening of tuberculosis and has gone to some place in the South for treatment. The two others were never there when I went to see Pauline; the one who was now before me was certainly the youngest. I showed no trace of astonishment, but, taking an abrupt leave of young George after learning that he was going home to lunch, I jumped into a taxi in order to get to Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs before him. I expected that at this hour of the morning Pauline would keep me to lunch—which was exactly what happened; I had brought away a copy of my book from Perrin’s, and made up my mind to present it to her as an excuse for my unexpected visit.

It was the first time I had taken a meal at Pauline’s.