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English. Thus, he was not surprised to find a septuagenarian baronet tramping around in the wilds of Africa after some fabled, doubtless totally nonexistent, city. He was interested when he found out that the dead Phileas was not Sir William’s first child of that name. He eavesdropped on Lady Martha’s conversations with her crony, the widowed Lady Jane Brandon of nearby Brandon Beeches. And he discovered that Sir William’s fourth marriage, in 1832, had resulted in two children, a Phileas and a Roxana. His fourth wife, daughter of an old and noble Devonshire family, had remarried after divorcing Sir William. Lady Martha did not know whom the woman had married, since all her information was based on some scattered remarks by Sir William. She did know that Lady Lorina had hated Sir William so much that she had gotten her new husband to adopt her children. Sir William had not objected to this nor to her wish that he never see her or their children again. This was why, Lady Martha told Lady Jane, Sir William’s son by his tenth marriage would inherit the baronetcy. His children by Lady Lorina would inherit nothing. Of course, there had been some legal difficulties, since the title was supposed to go to the eldest surviving son. But that had been taken care of.
    Passepartout had thought little of this and some additional information she had let drop. When he had ascertained that Sir William would probably not be back to civilization for a long time, he was removed from the case. After his resignation, he was sent into the service of Lord Longferry, a Member of Parliament and a drunk. (In those days, the two were often synonymous.) Passepartout was startled when he found out that Longferry’s Christian name was Phileas. Could this be a coincidence? Or was it connected, no doubt in a sinister way, with Sir William and his Phileases?
    During his short stay with Longferry, Passepartout managed to spend some time in the reading room of the British Museum. It was necessary to get a recommendation for admittance, but Longferry himself had furnished this. He had laughed when his valet asked him for it, as if a member of the lower classes and a Frenchman at that, could not possibly be interested in intellectual matters. But he had consented to send down a note to the proper authority. Passepartout had then discovered a very definite connection between the Phileases, though its significance had been beyond him at that time. The grandfather of the present Lord Longferry had been a Phileas, the original, in fact. He had been a very close friend of William Clayton in their youth. Both had gone off to fight with Byron and the Greeks in their battle for independence. Captured by the Turks, young Longferry had died of maltreatment (probably of gang rape by the homosexual Turks, Passepartout thought) and of a fever. William Clayton had grieved for a long time for his dead friend. He had tried to perpetuate the memory of his friend by naming two sons after him. The first had disappeared, as far as the records went. He looked through the newspapers of 1832 through 1836. He found a notice of Sir William’s and Lady Lorina’s divorce (which had required an act of Parliament), but he could find nothing about her remarriage.
    A record of it had to exist, of course, and Passepartout intended to track it down. But he was ordered, via a game of cards, to quit his present master. He did this by severely reprimanding the noble for having been carried home intoxicated early one morning. Two days later, the cards, dealt out by a beautiful woman of twenty-five, told him to seek immediate employment with a Mr. Phileas Fogg.
    Phileas! One more thread, no, cable, rather, in this mysterious network. Passepartout felt frightened. What did all these Phileases mean? Surely an enlightenment would come someday, and what now seemed so complex would turn out to be laughably simple.
    When he received his first message, he had assumed that Fogg was another of the