At that he beamed upon me blandly, and remarked that such a thing
was unfortunate, but that without doubt M'sieur would make all haste
to re-copy it, and would let him have a new draft as soon as
possible.
I shook my head, feeling my lips and throat grow dry as I answered--
"That which you had was the original, not a copy. I have no copy of
it from which I can replace it."
"But M'sieur will certainly have his notes, his private work, his
first scheme?"
"None. I do not work in that way. There is not a scrap of paper
relative to it anywhere."
Upon this the publisher rose, looked at me in a long silence, and
then said in an icy tone,--
"Then M'sieur wishes me to understand that he does not intend to
allow our firm to publish his work at all?"
I flushed at the insult his words contained. They practically
intimated that he thought the whole thing an invention, and that I
was going to give the MS. elsewhere. I got up too, and said--
"I have told you the MS. is destroyed, and I have no means of
reproducing it, therefore it is impossible for it to be brought out
by your or any other firm."
The man before me merely raised his shoulders over his ears, bowed,
spread out the palms of his hands, raised his eyebrows, and
muttered,--
"Comme vous voulez, M'sieur."
Confound him! was he a liar that he assumed me to be one.
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