M. de. Meroul replied in a hesitating voice:

"Why, these--these are my--my newspapers."

"Your newspapers! Look here, now, you are only laughing at me! You will
do me the favor to read mine, to stir you up with a few new ideas, and,
as for yours--this is what I do with them--"

And before his host, filled with confusion, could prevent him, he seized
the two newspapers and flung them out through the window. Then he
gravely placed "La Justice" in the hands of Madame de Meroul and "Le
Voltaire" in those of her husband, himself sinking into an armchair to
finish "L'Intransigeant."

The husband and the wife, through feelings of delicacy, made a show of
reading a little, then they handed back the Republican newspapers which
they touched with their finger-tips as if they had been poisoned.

Then Mouradour burst out laughing, and said:

"A week of this sort of nourishment, and I'll have you converted to my
ideas."

At the end of a week, in fact, he ruled the house. He had shut the door
on the cure, whom Madame de Meroul went to see in secret. He gave orders
that neither the "Gaulois" nor the "Clarion" were to be admitted into
the house, which a manservant went to get in a mysterious fashion at the
post-office, and which, on his entrance, were hidden away under the sofa
cushions. He regulated everything just as he liked, always charming,
always good-natured, a jovial and all-powerful tyrant.