tout sera dit, • the thing vvill be donc

18. comme... semblait, 'as she liked,' ///. 'as seemed good to her.' The omission of the pronoun as subject of the verb was more common in old French than it is now ; modem French chiefly shows it in a few stereotyped phrases, such as quand bon me semblera, * when I choose,' soit dit entre nous, ' let us admit.*

lOO LE CHIEN DU CAPITAINE.

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9. tapisserie de Pénélope. The allusion is to the famous * web ' vvhich Pénélope wove by day and unravelled by niglit. Not before the completion of her work, she had said, would she choose one among the many suitors who filled her house during the wanderings of her husband Odysseus after the taking of Troy. So each niglit she destroyed the day's task, and played the suitors off against one another till his retum in the loth year.

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7. la patte dans le sac, *red-pawed,' i.e. in the very act of theft, prendre qtulqtCtm la main dans h sac^ meaning ' to catch a person red-handed.'

8. le mettre dans l'impossibilité, ' to make it impossible for him.' 13. Cartouclie. Cartouche was a celebrated robber of the early

i8th century, whose name has passed into a byword, like that of Dick Turpin in England.

Mandrin. Mandrin was a famous smuggler and criminal of the time of Louis XV. (17 15 — 1774) ; his name is used to signify a person capable of great crimes.