'
'It is easily done,' he cried, with the enthusiasm of a true French
artist. 'And may I place within some little design of my own which
will astonish your friends the English, and delight my friends the
French?'
'Monsieur,' said I, 'I am in your hands. I trust the project entirely
to your skill,' and thus it came about that four days later I
substituted the bogus globe for the real one, and, unseen, dropped the
picric bomb from one of the bridges into the Seine.
On the morning of the procession I was compelled to allow Simard
several drinks of absinthe to bring him up to a point where he could
be depended on, otherwise his anxiety and determination to fling the
bomb, his frenzy against all government, made it certain that he would
betray both of us before the fateful moment came. My only fear was
that I could not stop him drinking when once he began, but somehow our
days of close companionship, loathsome as they were to me, seemed to
have had the effect of building up again the influence I held over him
in former days, and his yielding more or less to my wishes appeared to
be quite unconscious on his part.
The procession was composed entirely of carriages, each containing
four persons--two Englishmen sat on the back seats, with two Frenchmen
in front of them.
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