Joseph Buquet had no business to talk of things that don't concern him—it will bring him bad luck—mother was saying so last night——" There was a sound of hurried and heavy footsteps in the passage and a breathless voice cried: "Cecile! Cecile! Are you there?" "It's mother's voice," said Jammes. "What's the matter?" She opened the door. A respectable lady, built on the lines of a Pomeranian grenadier, burst into the dressing-room and dropped groaning into a vacant arm-chair. Her eyes rolled madly in her brick-dust colored face. "How awful!" she said. "How awful!" "What? What?" "Joseph Buquet!" "What about him?" "Joseph Buquet is dead!" The room became filled with exclamations, with astonished outcries, with scared requests for explanations. "Yes, he was found hanging in the third-floor cellar!" "It's the ghost!" little Giry blurted, as though in spite of herself; but she at once corrected herself, with her hands pressed to her mouth: "No, no!—I, didn't say it!—I didn't say it!——" All around her, her panic-stricken companions repeated under their breaths: "Yes—it must be the ghost!" Sorelli was very pale. "I shall never be able to recite my speech," she said. Ma Jammes gave her opinion, while she emptied a glass of liqueur that happened to be standing on a table; the ghost must have something to do with it. The truth is that no one ever knew how Joseph Buquet met his death. The verdict at the inquest was "natural suicide." In his Memoirs of Manager, M. Moncharmin, one of the joint managers who succeeded MM. Debienne and Poligny, describes the
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