J.K. HUYSMANS (continued 3)

She herself got him out of his difficulty. "Let us not discuss it any more," she said, smiling, "we shall not get any

"And it is the woman who wrote me such vivid letters, who now speaks to me of reason, good sense, and God knows what!"

"But be frank, now. You don't love me."

"I don't?"

He took her hands, gently. She made no resistance, but looking at him squarely she said, "Listen. If you had loved me you would have come to see me; and yet for months you haven't tried to find out whether I was alive or dead."

"But you understand that I could not hope to be welcomed by you on the terms we now are on, and too, in your parlour there are guests, your husband—I have never had you even a little bit to myself at your home."

He pressed her hands more tightly and came closer to her. She regarded him with her smoky eyes, in which he now saw that dolent, almost dolorous expression which had captivated him. He completely lost control of himself before this voluptuous and plaintive face, but with a firm gesture she freed her hands.

"Enough. Sit down, now, and let's talk of something else. Do you know your apartment is charming? Which saint is that?" she asked, examining the picture, over the mantel, of the monk on his knees beside a cardinal's hat and cloak.

"I do not know."

"I will find out for you. I have the lives of all the saints at home. It ought to be easy to find out about a cardinal who renounced the purple to go live in a hut. Wait. I

"But I don't know who he is!"

She came closer to him and put her hand on his shoulder.

"Are you angry at me?"

"I should say I am! When I desire you frantically, when I've been dreaming for a whole week about this meeting, you come here and tell me that all is over between us, that you do not love me—"

She became demure. "But if I did not love you, would I have come to you? Understand, then, that reality kills a dream; that it is better for us not to expose ourselves to fearful regrets. We are not children, you see. No! Let me go. Do not squeeze me like that!" Very pale, she struggled in his embrace. "I swear to you that I will go away and that you shall never see me again if you do not let me loose." Her voice became hard. She was almost hissing her words. He let go of her. "Sit down there behind the table. Do that for me." And tapping the floor with her heel, she said, in a tone of melancholy, "Then it is impossible to be friends, only friends, with a man. But it would be very nice to come and see you without having evil thoughts to fear, wouldn't it?" She was silent. Then she added, "Yes, just to see each other—and if we did not have any sublime things to say to each other, it is also very nice to sit and say nothing!"

Then she said, "My time is up. I must go home."

"And leave me with no hope?" he exclaimed, kissing her gloved hands.

She did not answer, but gently shook her head, then, as he looked pleadingly at her, she said, "Listen. If you will promise to make no demands on me and to be good, I will come here night after next at nine o'clock."

He promised whatever she wished. And as he raised his head from her hands and as his lips brushed lightly over her breast, which seemed to tighten, she disengaged her hands,

"Oof!" he said, closing the door after her. He was at the same time satisfied and vexed.

Satisfied, because he found her enigmatic, changeful, charming. Now that he was alone he recalled her to memory. He remembered her tight black dress, her fur cloak, the warm collar of which had caressed him as he was covering her neck with kisses. He remembered that she wore no jewellery, except sparkling blue sapphire eardrops. He remembered the wayward blonde hair escaping from under the dark green otter hat. Holding his hands to his nostrils he sniffed again the sweet and distant odour, cinnamon lost among stronger perfumes, which he had caught from the contact of her long, fawn-coloured suède gloves, and he saw again her moist, rodent teeth, her thin, bitten lips, and her troubled eyes, of a grey and opaque lustre which could suddenly be transfigured with radiance. "Oh, night after next it will be great to kiss all that!"

Vexed also, both with himself and with her. He reproached himself with having been brusque and reserved. He ought to have shown himself more expansive and less restrained. But it was her fault, for she had abashed him! The incongruity between the woman who cried with voluptuous suffering in her letters and the woman he had seen, so thoroughly mistress of herself in her coquetries, was truly too much!

"However you look at them, these women are astonishing creatures," he thought. "Here is one who accomplishes the most difficult thing you can imagine: coming to a man's room after having written him excessive letters. I, I act like a goose. I stand there ill at ease. She, in a second, has the self-assurance of a person in her own home, or visiting in a drawing-room. No awkwardness, pretty gestures, a few words, and eyes which supply everything! She isn't very agreeable," he thought, reminded of the curt tone she had used when disengaging herself, "and yet she has her tender

"Come to think of it, she is an old hand, Mme. Hyacinthe! She would not have a meeting in a café nor in the street. She scented from afar the assignation house or the hotel. And though, from the mere fact of my not inviting her here, she could not doubt that I did not want to introduce her to my lodging, she came here deliberately. Then, this first denial, come to think of it, is only a fine farce. If she were not seeking a liaison she would not have visited me. No, she wanted me to beg her to do what she wanted to do. Like all women, she wanted me to offer her what she desired. I have been rolled. Her arrival has knocked the props out from under my whole method. But what does it matter? She is no less desirable," he concluded, happy to get rid of disagreeable reflections and plunge back into the delirious vision which he retained of her. "That night won't be exactly dreary," he thought, seeing again her eyes, imagining them in surrender, deceptive and plaintive, as he would disrobe her and make a body white and slender, warm and supple, emerge from her tight skirt. "She has no children. That is an earnest promise that her flesh is quite firm, even at thirty!"

A whole draft of youth intoxicated him. Durtal, astonished, took a look at himself in the mirror. His tired eyes brightened, his face seemed more youthful, less worn. "Lucky I had just shaved," he said to himself. But gradually, as he mused, he saw in this mirror, which he was so little in the habit of consulting, his features droop and his eyes lose their sparkle. His stature, which had seemed to increase in this spiritual upheaval, diminished again. Sad

The next morning he woke, thinking of her, just as he had been doing when he went to sleep. He tried to rationalize the episode and revolved his conjectures over and over. Once again he put himself this question: "Why, when I went to her house, did she not let me see that I pleased her? Never a look, never a word to encourage me. Why this correspondence, when it was so easy to insist on having me to dine, so simple to prepare an occasion which would bring us together, either at her home or elsewhere?" And he answered himself, "It would have been usual and not at all diverting. She is perhaps skilled in these matters. She knows that the unknown frightens a man's reason away, that the unembodied puts the soul in ferment, and she wished to give me a fever before trying an attack—to call her advances by their right name.

"It must be admitted that if my conjectures are correct she is strangely astute. At heart she is, perhaps, quite simply a crazy romantic or a comedian. It amuses her to manufacture little adventures, to throw tantalizing obstacles in the way of the realization of a vulgar desire. And Chantelouve? He is probably aware of his wife's goings on, which perhaps facilitate his career. Otherwise, how could she arrange to come here at nine o'clock at night, instead of the morning or afternoon on pretence of going shopping?"

To this new question there could be no answer, and little by little he ceased to interrogate himself on the point. He began to be obsessed by the real woman as he had been by the imaginary creature. The latter had completely vanished. He did not even remember her physiognomy now. Mme.

"High time it was over and done with," he said, for this Saint Vitus' dance went on not without certain diminution of force, which disturbed him. In fact he feared, after the febrile agitation of his nights, to reveal himself as a sorry paladin when the time came. "But why bother?" he rejoined, as he started toward Carhaix's, where he was to dine with the astrologer Gévingey and Des Hermies.

"I shall be rid of my obsession awhile," he murmured, groping along in the darkness of the tower.

Des Hermies, hearing him come up the stair, opened the door, casting a shaft of light into the spiral. Durtal, reaching the landing, saw his friend in shirt sleeves and enveloped in an apron.

"I am, as you see, in the heat of composition," and upon a stew-pan boiling on the stove Des Hermies cast that brief and sure look which a mechanic gives his machine, then he consulted, as if it were a manometer, his watch, hanging to a nail. "Look," he said, raising the pot lid.

Durtal bent over and through a cloud of vapour he saw a coiled napkin rising and falling with the little billows. "Where is the leg of mutton?"

"It, my friend, is sewn into that cloth so tightly that the air cannot enter. It is cooking in this pretty, singing sauce, into which I have thrown a handful of hay, some pods of garlic and slices of carrot and onion, some grated nutmeg, and laurel and thyme. You will have many compliments to make me if Gévingey doesn't keep us waiting too long, because a gigot à l'Anglaise won't stand being cooked to shreds."

Carhaix's wife looked in.

"Come in," she said. "My husband is here."

Durtal found him dusting the books. They shook hands. Durtal, at random, looked over some of the dusted books lying on the table.

"Are these," he asked, "technical works about metals and bell-founding or are they about the liturgy of bells?"

"They are not about founding, though there is sometimes reference to the founders, the 'sainterers' as they were called in the good old days. You will discover here and there some details about alloys of red copper and fine tin. You will even find, I believe, that the art of the 'sainterer' has been in decline for three centuries, probably due to the fact that the faithful no longer melt down their ornaments of precious metals, thus modifying the alloy. Or is it because the founders no longer invoke Saint Anthony the Eremite when the bronze is boiling in the furnace? I do not know. It is true, at any rate, that bells are now made in carload lots. Their voices are without personality. They are all the same. They're like docile and indifferent hired girls when formerly they were like those aged servants who became part of the family whose joys and griefs they have shared. But what difference does that make to the clergy and the congregation? At present these auxiliaries devoted to the cult do not represent any symbol. And that explains the whole difficulty.

"You asked me, a few seconds ago, whether these books treated of bells from the liturgical point of view. Yes, most of them give tabulated explanations of the significance of the various component parts. The interpretations are simple and offer little variety."

"What are a few of them?"

"I can sum them all up for you in a very few words. According to the Rational of Guillaume Durand, the hardness of the metal signifies the force of the preacher. The percussion of the clapper on the sides expresses the idea that the preacher must first scourge himself to correct himself of his own vices before reproaching the vices of others. The wooden frame represents the cross of Christ, and the cord,

"The most ancient liturgists expound practically the same symbols. Jean Beleth, who lived in 1200, declares also that the bell is the image of the preacher, but adds that its motion to and fro, when it is set swinging, teaches that the preacher must by turns elevate his language and bring it down within reach of the crowd. For Hugo of Saint Victor the clapper is the tongue of the officiating priest, which strikes the two sides of the vase and announces thus, at the same time, the truth of the two Testaments. Finally, if we consult Fortunatus Amalarius, perhaps the most ancient of the liturgists, we find simply that the body of the bell denotes the mouth of the preacher and the hammer his tongue."

"But," said Durtal, somewhat disappointed, "it isn't—what shall I say?—very profound."

The door opened.

"Why, how are you!" said Carhaix, shaking hands with Gévingey, and then introducing him to Durtal.

While the bell-ringer's wife finished setting the table, Durtal examined the newcomer. He was a little man, wearing a soft black felt hat and wrapped up like an omnibus conductor in a cape with a military collar of blue cloth.

His head was like an egg with the hollow downward. The skull, waxed as if with siccatif, seemed to have grown up out of the hair, which was hard and like filaments of dried coconut and hung down over his neck. The nose was bony, and the nostrils opened like two hatchways, over a toothless mouth which was hidden by a moustache grizzled like the goatee springing from the short chin. At first glance one would have taken him for an art-worker, a wood engraver or a glider of saints' images, but on looking at him more closely, observing the eyes, round and grey, set close to the nose, almost crossed, and studying his solemn voice and

He took off his things and appeared in a black frock coat of square, boxlike cut. A fine gold chain, passed about his neck, lost itself in the bulging pocket of an old vest. Durtal gasped when Gévingey, as soon as he had seated himself, complacently put his hands on exhibition, resting them on his knees. Enormous, freckled with blotches of orange, and terminating in milk-white nails cut to the quick, the fingers were covered with huge rings, the sets of which formed a phalanx.

Seeing Durtal's gaze fixed on his fingers, he smiled. "You examine my valuables, monsieur. They are of three metals, gold, platinum, and silver. This ring bears a scorpion, the sign under which I was born. That with its two accoupled triangles, one pointing downward and the other upward, reproduces the image of the macrocosm, the seal of Solomon, the grand pantacle. As for the little one you see here," he went on, showing a lady's ring set with a tiny sapphire between two roses, "that is a present from a person whose horoscope I was good enough to cast."

"Ah!" said Durtal, somewhat surprised at the man's self-satisfaction.

"Dinner is ready," said the bell-ringer's wife.

Des Hermies, doffing his apron, appeared in his tight cheviot garments. He was not so pale as usual, his cheeks being red from the heat of the stove. He set the chairs around.

Carhaix served the broth, and everyone was silent, taking spoonfuls of the cooler broth at the edge of the bowl. Then madame brought Des Hermies the famous leg of mutton to cut. It was a magnificent red, and large drops flowed beneath the knife. Everybody ecstasized when tasting this robust meat, aromatic with a purée of turnips sweetened with caper sauce.

Des Hermies bowed under a storm of compliments. Carhaix filled the glasses, and, somewhat confused in the pres

Then Gévingey mounted the rostrum. In a tone of satisfaction he spoke of his vast labours, of the six months a horoscope required, of the surprise of laymen when he declared that such work was not paid for by the price he asked, five hundred francs.

"But you see I cannot give my science for nothing," he said. "And now people doubt astrology, which was revered in antiquity. Also in the Middle Ages, when it was almost sacred. For instance, messieurs, look at the portal of Notre Dame. The three doors which archeologists—not initiated into the symbolism of Christianity and the occult—designate by the names of the door of Judgment, the door of the Virgin, and the door of Saint Marcel or Saint Anne, really represent Mysticism, Astrology, and Alchemy, the three great sciences of the Middle Ages. Today you find people who say, 'Are you quite sure that the stars have an influence on the destiny of man?' But, messieurs, without entering here into details reserved for the adept, in what way is this spiritual influence stranger than that corporal influence which certain planets, the moon, for example, exercise on the organs of men and women?

"You are a physician, Monsieur Des Hermies, and you are not unaware that the doctors Gillespin, Jackson, and Balfour, of Jamaica, have established the influence of the constellations on human health in the West Indies. At every change of the moon the number of sick people augments. The acute crises of fever coincide with the phases of our satellite. Finally, there are lunatics. Go out in the country and ascertain at what periods madness becomes epidemic. But does this serve to convince the incredulous?" he asked sorrowfully, contemplating his rings.

"It seems to me, on the contrary, that astrology is picking

"And it's a shame! Those people don't even know the first thing about the science. They are simply tricksters who hope thus to pick up some money. What's the use of speaking of them when they don't even exist! Really it must be admitted that only in England and America is there anybody who knows how to establish the genethliac theme and construct a horoscope."

"I am very much afraid," said Des Hermies, "that not only these so-called astrologers, but also all the mages, theosophists, occultists, and cabalists of the present day, know absolutely nothing—those with whom I am acquainted are indubitably, incontestably, ignorant imbeciles. And that is the pure truth, messieurs. These people are, for the most part, down-and-out journalists or broken spendthrifts seeking to exploit the taste of a public weary of positivism. They plagiarize Eliphas Levi, steal from Fabre d'Olivet, and write treatises of which they themselves are incapable of making head or tail. It's a real pity, when you come to think of it."

"The more so as they discredit sciences which certainly contain verities omitted in their jumble," said Durtal.

"Then another lamentable thing," said Des Hermies, "is that in addition to the dupes and simpletons, these little sects harbour some frightful charlatans and windbags."

"Péladan, among others. Who does not know that shoddy mage, commercialized to his fingertips?" cried Durtal.

"Oh, yes, that fellow—"

"Briefly, messieurs," resumed Gévingey, "all these people are incapable of obtaining in practise any effect whatever. The only man in this century who, without being either a saint or a diabolist, has penetrated the mysteries, is William Crookes." And as Durtal, who appeared to doubt the apparitions sworn to by this Englishman, declared that no

"I know it," Durtal said, "and that horrifies me. I know also the Hindu dogma of the migrations of souls after death. These disembodied souls stray until they are reincarnated or until they attain, from avatar to avatar, to complete purity. Well, I think it's quite enough to live once. I'd prefer nothingness, a hole in the ground, to all those metamorphoses. It's more consoling to me. As for the evocation of the dead, the mere thought that the butcher on the corner can force the soul of Hugo, Balzac, Baudelaire, to converse with him, would put me beside myself, if I believed it. Ah, no. Materialism, abject as it is, is less vile than that."

"Spiritism," said Carhaix, "is only a new name for the ancient necromancy condemned and cursed by the Church."

Gévingey looked at his rings, then emptied his glass.

"In any case," he returned, "you will admit that these theories can be upheld, especially that of the elementals, which, setting Satanism aside, seems the most veridic, and certainly is the most clear. Space is peopled by microbes. Is it more surprising that space should also be crammed with spirits and larvæ? Water and vinegar are alive with animalcules. The microscope shows them to us. Now why should not the air, inaccessible to the sight and to the instruments of man, swarm, like the other elements, with beings more or less corporeal, embryos more or less mature?"

"That is probably why cats suddenly look upward and

"No, thanks," said Gévingey to Des Hermies, who was offering him another helping of egg-and-dandelion salad.

"My friends," said the bell-ringer, "you forget only one doctrine, that of the Church, which attributes all these inexplicable phenomena to Satan. Catholicism has known them for a long time. It did not need to wait for the first manifestations of the spirits—which were produced, I believe, in 1847, in the United States, through the Fox family—before decreeing that spirit rapping came from the Devil. You will find in Saint Augustine the proof, for he had to send a priest to put an end to noises and overturning of objects and furniture, in the diocese of Hippo, analogous to those which Spiritism points out. At the time of Theodoric also, Saint Cæsaræus ridded a house of lemurs haunting it. You see, there are only the City of God and the City of the Devil. Now, since God is above these cheap manipulations, the occultists and spiritists satanize more or less, whether they wish to or not."

"Nevertheless, Spiritism has accomplished one important thing. It has violated the threshold of the unknown, broken the doors of the sanctuary. It has brought about in the extranatural a revolution similar to that which was effected in the terrestrial order in France in 1789. It has democratized evocation and opened a whole new vista. Only, it has lacked initiates to lead it, and, proceeding at random without science, it has agitated good and bad spirits together. In Spiritism you will find a jumble of everything. It is the hash of mystery, if I may be permitted the expression."

"The saddest thing about it," said Des Hermies, laughing, "is that at a séance one never sees a thing! I know that experiments have been successful, but those which I have witnessed—well, the experimenters seemed to take a long shot and miss."

"That is not surprising," said the astrologer, spreading some firm candied orange jelly on a piece of bread, "the first

"Then how can there be any assurance of the reality of the phenomena?" thought Durtal.

Carhaix rose. "I shall be back in ten minutes." He put on his greatcoat, and soon the sound of his steps was lost in the tower.

"True," murmured Durtal, consulting his watch. "It's a quarter to eight."

There was a moment of silence in the room. As all refused to have any more dessert, Mme. Carhaix took up the tablecloth and spread an oilcloth in its place.

The astrologer played with his rings, turning them about; Durtal was rolling a pellet of crumbled bread between his fingers; Des Hermies, leaning over to one side, pulled from his patch pocket his embossed Japanese pouch and made a cigarette.

Then when the bell-ringer's wife had bidden them good night and retired to her room, Des Hermies got the kettle and the coffee pot.

"Want any help?" Durtal proposed.

"You can get the little glasses and uncork the liqueur bottles, if you will."

As he opened the cupboard, Durtal swayed, dizzy from the strokes of the bells which shook the walls and filled the room with clamour.

"If there are spirits in this room, they must be getting knocked to pieces," he said, setting the liqueur glasses on the table.

"Bells drive phantoms and spectres away," Gévingey answered, doctorally, filling his pipe.

"Here," said Des Hermies, "will you pour hot water slowly into the filter? I've got to feed the stove. It's getting chilly here. My feet are freezing."

Carhaix returned, blowing out his lantern.

"What do you think of him?" Des Hermies asked Durtal in a very low voice, and pointed at the astrologer, now lost in a cloud of pipe smoke.

"In repose he looks like an old owl, and when he speaks he makes me think of a melancholy and discursive schoolmaster."

"Only one," said Des Hermies to Carhaix, who was holding a lump of sugar over Des Hermies's coffee cup.

"I hear, monsieur, that you are occupied with a history of Gilles de Rais," said Gévingey to Durtal.

"Yes, for the time being I am up to my eyes in Satanism with that man."

"And," said Des Hermies, "we were just going to appeal to your extensive knowledge. You only can enlighten my friend on one of the most obscure questions of Diabolism."

"Which one?"

"That of incubacy and succubacy."

Gévingey did not answer at once. "That is a much graver question than Spiritism," he said at last, "and grave in a different way. But monsieur already knows something about it?"

"Only that opinions differ. Del Rio and Bodin, for instance, consider the incubi as masculine demons which couple with women and the succubi as demons who consummate the carnal act with men.

"According to their theories the incubi take the semen lost by men in dream and make use of it. So that two questions arise: first, can a child be born of such a union? The possibility of this kind of procreation has been upheld by the Church doctors, who affirm, even, that children of such commerce are heavier than others and can drain three nurses without taking on flesh. The second question is whether the demon who copulates with the mother or the man whose semen has been taken is the father of the child.

"For Sinistrari d'Ameno," observed Durtal, "the incubi and succubi are not precisely demons, but animal spirits, intermediate between the demon and the angel, a sort of satyr or faun, such as were revered in the time of paganism, a sort of imp, such as were exorcised in the Middle Ages. Sinistrari adds that they do not need to pollute a sleeping man, since they possess genitals and are endowed with prolificacy."

"Well, there is nothing further," said Gévingey. "Görres, so learned, so precise, in his Mystik passes rapidly over this question, even neglects it, and the Church, you know, is completely silent, for the Church does not like to treat this subject and views askance the priest who does occupy himself with it."

"I beg your pardon," said Carhaix, always ready to defend the Church. "The Church has never hesitated to declare itself on this detestable subject. The existence of succubi and incubi is certified by Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas, Saint Bonaventure, Denys le Chartreux, Pope Innocent VIII, and how many others! The question is resolutely settled for every Catholic. It also figures in the lives of some of the saints, if I am not mistaken. Yes, in the legend of Saint Hippolyte, Jacques de Voragine tells how a priest, tempted by a naked succubus, cast his stole at its head and it suddenly became the corpse of some dead woman whom the Devil had animated to seduce him."

"Yes," said Gévingey, whose eyes twinkled. "The Church recognizes succubacy, I grant. But let me speak, and you will see that my observations are not uncalled for.

"You know very well, messieurs," addressing Des Hermies and Durtal, "what the books teach, but within a hundred years everything has changed, and if the facts I am

"At present it is less frequently demons than bodies raised from the dead which fill the indispensable rôle of incubus and succubus. In other words, formerly the living being subject to succubacy was known to be possessed. Now that vampirism, by the evocation of the dead, is joined to demonism, the victim is worse than possessed. The Church did not know what to do. Either it must keep silent or reveal the possibility of the evocation of the dead, already forbidden by Moses, and this admission was dangerous, for it popularized the knowledge of acts that are easier to produce now than formerly, since without knowing it Spiritism has traced the way.

"So the Church has kept silent. And Rome is not unaware of the frightful advance incubacy has made in the cloisters in our days."

"That proves that continence is hard to bear in solitude," said Des Hermies.

"It merely proves that the soul is feeble and that people have forgotten how to pray," said Carhaix.

"However that may be, messieurs, to instruct you completely in this matter, I must divide the creatures smitten with incubacy or succubacy into two classes. The first is composed of persons who have directly and voluntarily given themselves over to the demoniac action of the spirits. These persons are quite rare and they all die by suicide or some other form of violent death. The second is composed of persons on whom the visitation of spirits has been imposed by a spell. These are very numerous, especially in the convents dominated by the demoniac societies. Ordinarily these victims end in madness. The psychopathic hospitals are crowded with them. The doctors and the majority of the priests do not know the cause of their madness, but the cases are curable. A thaumaturge of my acquaintance has saved a good many of the bewitched who without his aid would be

"I want to ask you," said Des Hermies, "does a woman receive the visit of the incubus while she is asleep or while she is awake?"

"A distinction must be made. If the woman is not the victim of a spell, if she voluntarily consorts with the impure spirit, she is always awake when the carnal act takes place. If, on the other hand, the woman is the victim of sorcery, the sin is committed either while she is asleep or while she is awake, but in the latter case she is in a cataleptic state which prevents her from defending herself. The most powerful of present-day exorcists, the man who has gone most thoroughly into this matter, one Johannès, Doctor of Theology, told me that he had saved nuns who had been ridden without respite for two, three, even four days by incubi!"

"I know that priest," remarked Des Hermies.

"And the act is consummated in the same manner as the normal human act?"

"Yes and no. Here the dirtiness of the details makes me hesitate," said Gévingey, becoming slightly red. "What I can tell you is more than strange. Know, then, that the organ of the incubus is bifurcated and at the same time penetrates both vases. Formerly it extended, and while one branch of the fork acted in the licit channels, the other at the same time reached up to the lower part of the face. You may imagine, gentlemen, how life must be shortened by operations which are multiplied through all the senses."

"And you are sure that these are facts?"

"Absolutely."

"But come now, you have proofs?"

Gévingey was silent, then, "The subject is so grave and I have gone so far that I had better go the rest of the way.

"Canon Docre," Des Hermies interposed.

"Yes, and my sleep was fitful. It was broad daylight. I swear to you that the succubus came, irritant and palpable and most tenacious. Happily, I remembered the formula of deliverance, which kept me—

"So I ran that very day to Doctor Johannès, of whom I have spoken. He immediately and forever, I hope, liberated me from the spell."

"If I did not fear to be indiscreet, I would ask you what kind of thing this succubus was, whose attack you repulsed."

"Why, it was like any naked woman," said the astrologer hesitantly.

"Curious, now, if it had demanded its little gifts, its little gloves—" said Durtal, biting his lips.

"And do you know what has become of the terrible Docre?" Des Hermies inquired.

"No, thank God. They say he is in the south, somewhere around Nîmes, where he formerly resided."

"But what does this abbé do?" inquired Durtal.

"What does he do? He evokes the Devil, and he feeds white mice on the hosts which he consecrates. His frenzy for sacrilege is such that he had the image of Christ tattooed on his heels so that he could always step on the Saviour!"

"Well," murmured Carhaix, whose militant moustache bristled while his great eyes flamed, "if that abominable priest were here, I swear to you that I would respect his feet, but that I would throw him downstairs head first."

"And the black mass?" inquired Des Hermies.

"He celebrates it with foul men and women. He is openly accused of having influenced people to make wills in his favor and of causing inexplicable death. Unfortunately, there are no laws to repress sacrilege, and how can you prosecute a man who sends maladies from a distance and kills slowly in such a way that at the autopsy no traces of poison appear?"

"The modern Gilles de Rais!" exclaimed Durtal.

"

"Could he insinuate into a victim the idea to drink, regularly, in graduated doses, a toxin which he would designate, and which would simulate the phases of a malady?" asked Durtal.

"Nothing simpler. 'Open window burglars' that the physicians of the present day are, they recognize perfectly the ability of a more skilful man to pull off such jobs. The experiments of Beaunis, Liégois, Liébaut, and Bernheim are conclusive: you can even get a person assassinated by another to whom you suggest, without his knowledge, the will to the crime."

"I was thinking of something, myself," said Carhaix, who had been reflecting and not listening to this discussion of hypnotism. "Of the Inquisition. It certainly had its reason for being. It is the only agent that could deal with this fallen priest whom the Church has swept out."

"And remember," said Des Hermies, with his crooked smile playing around the corner of his mouth, "that the ferocity of the Inquisition has been greatly exaggerated. No doubt the benevolent Bodin speaks of driving long needles between the nails and the flesh of the sorcerers' fingers. 'An excellent gehenna,' says he. He eulogizes equally the torture by fire, which he characterizes as 'an exquisite death.' But he wishes only to turn the magicians away from their detestable practises and save their souls. Then Del Rio declares that 'the question' must not be applied to demoniacs after they have eaten, for fear they will vomit. He worried about their stomachs, this worthy man. Wasn't it also he who decreed that the torture must not be repeated twice in the same day, so as to give fear and pain a chance to calm down? Admit that the good Jesuit was not devoid of delicacy!"

"Docre," Gévingey went on, not paying any attention to the words of Des Hermies, "is the only individual who has

"But how did a priest fall so low?"

"I can't say. If you wish ampler information about him," said Gévingey, addressing Des Hermies, "question your friend Chantelouve."

"Chantelouve!" cried Durtal.

"Yes, he and his wife used to be quite intimate with Canon Docre, but I hope for their sakes that they have long since ceased to have dealings with the monster."

Durtal listened no more. Mme. Chantelouve knew Canon Docre! Ah, was she Satanic, too? No, she certainly did not act like a possessed. "Surely this astrologer is cracked," he thought. She! And he called her image before him, and thought that tomorrow night she would probably give herself to him. Ah, those strange eyes of hers, those dark clouds suddenly cloven by radiant light!

She came now and took complete possession of him, as before he had ascended to the tower. "But if I didn't love you would I have come to you?" That sentence which she had spoken, with a caressing inflection of the voice, he heard again, and again he saw her mocking and tender face.

"Ah, you are dreaming," said Des Hermies, tapping him on the shoulder. "We have to go. It's striking ten."

When they were in the street they said good night to Gévingey, who lived on the other side of the river. Then they walked along a little way.

"Well," said Des Hermies, "are you interested in my astrologer?"

"He is slightly mad, isn't he?"

"Slightly? Humph."

"Well, his stories are incredible."

"Everything is incredible," said Des Hermies placidly,

"No, come to think it over, the effrontery of the positivists is appalling. They decree that Satanism does not exist. They lay everything at the account of major hysteria, and they

"Mmmm," said Durtal, who was now in front of his door. "Since anything can be maintained and nothing is certain, succubacy has it. Basically it is more literary—and cleaner—than positivism."

The day was long and hard to kill. Waking at dawn, full of thoughts of Mme. Chantelouve, he could not stay in one place, and kept inventing excuses for going out. He had no cakes, bonbons, and exotic liqueurs, and one must not be without all the little essentials when expecting a visit from a woman. He went by the longest route to the avenue de l'Opéra to buy fine essences of cedar and of that alkermes which makes the person tasting it think he is in an Oriental pharmaceutic laboratory. "The idea is," he said, "not so much to treat Hyacinthe as to astound her by giving her a sip of an unknown elixir."

He came back laden with packages, then went out again, and in the street was assailed by an immense ennui. After an interminable tour of the quays he finally tumbled into a beer hall. He fell on a bench and opened a newspaper.

What was he thinking as he sat, not reading but just looking at the police news? Nothing, not even of her. From having revolved the same matter over and over again and again his mind had reached a deadlock and refused to function. Durtal merely found himself very tired, very drowsy, as one in a warm bath after a night of travel.

"I must go home pretty soon," he said when he could collect himself a little, "for Père Rateau certainly has not cleaned house in the thorough fashion which I commanded, and of course I don't want the furniture to be covered with dust. Six o'clock. Suppose I dine, after a fashion, in some not too unreliable place."

He remembered a nearby restaurant where he had eaten before without a great deal of dread. He chewed his way

Back in his apartment, he lighted fires in his bedroom and in his study, then he inspected everything. He was not mistaken. The concierge had upset the place with the same brutality, the same haste, as customarily. However, he must have tried to wash the windows, because the glass was streaked with finger marks.

Durtal effaced the imprints with a damp cloth, smoothed out the folds in the carpet, drew the curtains, and put the bookcases in order after dusting them with a napkin. Everywhere he found grains of tobacco, trodden cigarette ashes, pencil sharpenings, pen points eaten with rust. He also found cocoons of cat fur and crumpled bits of rough draft manuscript which had been whirled into all corners by the furious sweeping.

He finally could not help asking himself why he had so long tolerated the fuzzy filth which obscured and incrusted his household. While he dusted, his indignation against Rateau increased mightily. "Look at that," he said, perceiving his wax candles grown as yellow as tallow ones. He changed them. "That's better." He arranged his desk into studied disarray. Notebooks, and books with paper-cutters in them for book-marks, he laid in careful disorder. "Symbol of work," he said, smiling, as he placed an old folio, open, on a chair. Then he passed into his bedroom. With a wet sponge he freshened up the marble of the dresser, then he smoothed the bed cover, straightened his photographs and engravings, and went into the bathroom. Here he paused, disheartened. In a bamboo rack over the wash-bowl there was a chaos of phials. Resolutely he grabbed the perfume bottles, scoured the bottoms and necks with emery, rubbed the labels with gum elastic and bread crumbs, then he soaped

Then he shaved, touched up his moustache, and proceeded to make an elaborate toilet, asking himself, as he dressed, whether he had better wear button shoes or slippers. He decided that shoes were less familiar and more dignified but resolved to wear a flowing tie and a blouse, thinking that this artistic negligée would please a woman.

"All ready," he said, after a last stroke of the brush. He made the turn of the other rooms, poked the fires, and fed the cat, which was running about in alarm, sniffing all the cleaned objects and doubtless thinking that those he rubbed against every day without paying any attention to them had been replaced by new ones.

"Oh, the 'little essentials' I am forgetting!" Durtal put the teakettle on the hob and placed cups, teapot, sugar bowl, cakes, bonbons, and tiny liqueur glasses on an old lacquered "waiter" so as to have everything on hand when it was time to serve.

"Now I'm through. I've given the place a thorough cleaning. Let her come," he said to himself, realigning some books whose backs stuck out further than the others on the shelves. "Everything in good shape. Except the chimney of the lamp. Where it bulges, there are caramel specks and blobs of soot, but I can't get the thing out; I don't want to burn my fingers; and anyway, with the shade lowered a bit she won't notice.

"Well, how shall I proceed when she does come?" he asked himself, sinking into an armchair. "She enters. Good. I take her hands. I kiss them. Then I bring her into this room. I have her sit down beside the fire, in this chair. I

"—Or rather lost. For then the bother begins. I can't bear to think of getting her into the bedroom. Undressing and going to bed! That part is appalling unless you know each other very well. And when you are just becoming acquainted! The nice way is to have a cosy little supper for two. The wine has an ungodly kick to it. She immediately passes out, and when she comes to she is lying in bed under a shower of kisses. As we can't do it that way we shall have to avoid mutual embarrassment by making a show of passion. If I speed up the tempo and pretend to be in a frenzy perhaps we shall not have time to think about the miserable details. So I must possess her here, in this very spot, and she must think I have lost my head when she succumbs.

"It's hard to arrange in this room, because there isn't any divan. The best way would be to throw her down on the carpet. She can put her hands over her eyes, as they always do. I shall take good care to turn down the lamp before she rises.

"Well, I had better prepare a cushion for her head." He found one and slid it under the chair. "And I had better not wear suspenders, for they often cause ridiculous delays." He took them off and put on a belt. "But then there is that damned question of the skirts! I admire the novelists who can get a virgin unharnessed from her corsets and deflowered in the winking of an eye—as if it were possible! How annoying to have to fight one's way through all those starched entanglements! I do hope Mme. Chantelouve will be considerate and avoid those ridiculous difficulties as much as possible—for her own sake."

He consulted his watch. "Half-past eight. I mustn't expect her for nearly an hour, because, like all women, she will come late. What kind of an excuse will she make to Chantelouve, to get away tonight? Well, that is none of

And if Hyacinthe did not come?

"She will come," he said to himself, suddenly moved. "What motive would she have for staying away? She knows that she cannot inflame me more than I am inflamed." Then, jumping from phase to phase of the same old question, "This will turn out badly, of course," he decided. "Once I am satisfied, disenchantment is inevitable. Oh, well, so much the better, for with this romance going on I cannot work."

"Miserable me! relapsing—only in mind, alas!—to the age of twenty. I am waiting for a woman. I who have scorned the doings of lovers for years and years. I look at my watch every five minutes, and I listen, in spite of myself, thinking it is her step I hear on the stair.

"No, there is no getting around it. The little blue flower, the perennial of the soul, is difficult to extirpate, and it keeps growing up again. It does not show itself for twenty years, and then all of a sudden, you know not why nor how, it sprouts, and then forth comes a burst of blossoms. My God! I am getting foolish."

He jumped from his chair. There was a gentle ring. "Not nine o'clock yet. It isn't she," he murmured, opening the door.

He squeezed her hands and thanked her for being so punctual.

She said she was not feeling well. "I came only because I didn't want to keep you waiting in vain."

His heart sank.

"I have a fearful headache," she said, passing her gloved hands over her forehead.

He took her furs and motioned her to the armchair. Prepared to follow his plan of attack, he sat down on the stool, but she refused the armchair and took a seat beside the

"Your hand is burning," she said.

"Yes, a bit of fever, because I get so little sleep. If you knew how much I have thought about you! Now I have you here, all to myself," and he spoke of that persistent odour of cinnamon, faint, distant, expiring amid the less definite odours which her gloves exhaled, "well," and he sniffed her fingers, "you will leave some of yourself here when you go away."

She rose, sighing. "I see you have a cat. What is his name?"

"Mouche."

She called to the cat, which fled precipitately.

"Mouche! Mouche!" Durtal called, but Mouche took refuge under the bed and refused to come out. "You see he is rather bashful. He has never seen a woman."

"Oh, would you try to make me think you have never received a woman here?"

He swore that he never had, that she was the first....

"And you were not really anxious that this—first—should come?"

He blushed. "Why do you say that?"

She made a vague gesture. "I want to tease you," she said, sitting down in the armchair. "To tell you the truth, I do not know why I like to ask you such presumptuous questions."

He had sat down in front of her. So now, at last, the scene was set as he wished and he must begin the attack. His knee touched hers.

"You know," he said, "that you cannot presume here. You have claims on—"

"No, I haven't and I want none."

"Why?"

"Because.... Listen," and her voice became grave and firm. "The more I reflect, the more inclined I am to ask

"You mean ...?"

"That I have only to desire them, to desire you, before I go to sleep...."

"And?"

"And you would be inferior to my chimera, to the Durtal I adore, whose caresses make my nights delirious!"

He looked at her in stupefaction. She had that dolent, troubled look in her eyes. She even seemed not to see him, but to be looking into space. He hesitated.... In a sudden flash of thought he saw the scenes of incubacy of which Gévingey had spoken. "We shall untangle all this later," he thought within himself, "meanwhile—" He took her gently by the arms, drew her to him and abruptly kissed her mouth.

She rebounded as if she had had an electric shock. She struggled to rise. He strained her to him and embraced her furiously, then with a strange gurgling cry she threw her head back and caught his leg between both of hers.

He emitted a howl of rage, for he felt her haunches move. He understood now—or thought he understood! She wanted a miserly pleasure, a sort of solitary vice....

He pushed her away. She remained there, quite pale, choking, her eyes closed, her hands outstretched like those of a frightened child. Then Durtal's wrath vanished. With a little cry he came up to her and caught her again, but she struggled, crying, "No! I beseech you, let me go."

He held her crushed against his body and attempted to make her yield.

"I implore you, let me go."

Her accent was so despairing that he relinquished her. Then he debated with himself whether to throw her brutally on the floor and violate her. But her bewildered eyes frightened him.

She was panting and her arms hung limp at her sides as she leaned, very pale, against the bookcase.

"Ah!" he said, marching up and down, knocking into the furniture, "I must really love you, if in spite of your supplications and refusals—"

She joined her hands to keep him away.

"Good God!" he said, exasperated, "what are you made of?"

She came to herself, and, offended, she said to him, "Monsieur, I too suffer. Spare me," and pell-mell she spoke of her husband, of her confessor, and became so incoherent that Durtal was frightened. She was silent, then in a singing voice she said, "Tell me, you will come to my house tomorrow night, won't you?"

"But I suffer too!"

She seemed not to hear him. In her smoky eyes, far, far back, there seemed to be a twinkle of feeble light. She murmured, in the cadence of a canticle, "Tell me, dear, you will come tomorrow night, won't you?"

"Yes," he said at last.

Then she readjusted herself and without saying a word quitted the room. In silence he accompanied her to the entrance. She opened the door, turned around, took his hand and very lightly brushed it with her lips.

He stood there stupidly, not knowing what to make of her behaviour.

"What does she mean?" he exclaimed, returning to the room, putting the furniture back in place and smoothing the disordered carpet. "Heavens, I wish I could as easily restore order to my brain. Let me think, if I can. What is she after? Because, of course, she has something in view. She does not want our relation to culminate in the act itself. Does she really fear disillusion, as she claims? Is she really

"I don't know. Incubacy enters into this. She admits—so placidly!—that in dream she cohabits at will with dead or living beings. Is she Satanizing, and is this some of the work of Canon Docre? He's a friend of hers.

"So many riddles impossible to solve. What is the meaning of this unexpected invitation for tomorrow night? Does she wish to yield nowhere except in her own home? Does she feel more at ease there, or does she think the propinquity of her husband will render the sin more piquant? Does she loathe Chantelouve, and is this a meditated vengeance, or does she count on the fear of danger to spur our senses?

"After all, I think it is probably a final coquetry, an appetizer before the repast. And women are so funny anyway! She probably thinks these delays and subterfuges are necessary to differentiate her from a cocotte. Or perhaps there is a physical necessity for stalling me off another day."

He sought other reasons but could find none.

"Deep down in my heart," he said, vexed in spite of himself by this rebuff, "I know I have been an imbecile. I ought to have acted the cave man and paid no attention to her supplications and lies. I ought to have taken violent possession of her lips and breast. Then it would be finished, whereas now I must begin at the beginning again, and God damn her! I have other things to do.

"Who knows whether she isn't laughing at me this very moment? Perhaps she wanted me to be more violent and bold—but no, her soul-sick voice was not feigned, her poor eyes did not simulate bewilderment, and then what would she have meant by that respectful kiss—for there was an impalpable shade of respect and gratitude in that kiss which she planted on my hand!"

She was too much for him. "Meanwhile, in this hurly-burly I have forgotten my refreshments. Suppose I take off my shoes, now that I am alone, for my feet are swollen from parading up and down the room. Suppose I do better yet and go to bed, for I am incapable of working or reading," and he drew back the covers.

"Decidedly, nothing happens the way one foresees it, yet my plan of attack wasn't badly thought out," he said, crawling in. With a sigh he blew out the lamp, and the cat, reassured, passed over him, lighter than a breath, and curled up without a sound.

Contrary to his expectations, he slept all night, with clenched fists, and woke next morning quite calm, even gay. The scene of the night before, which ought to have exacerbated his senses, produced exactly the opposite effect. The truth is that Durtal was not of those who are attracted by difficulties. He always made one hardy effort to surmount them, then when that failed he would withdraw, with no desire to renew the combat. If Mme. Chantelouve thought to entice him by delays, she had miscalculated. This morning, already, he was weary of the comedy.

His reflections began to be slightly tinged with bitterness. He was angry at the woman for having wished to keep him in suspense, and he was angry at himself for having permitted her to make a fool of him. Then certain expressions, the impertinence of which had not struck him at first, chilled him now. "Her nervous trick of laughing, which sometimes caught her in public places," then her declaration that she did not need his permission, nor even his person, in order to possess him, seemed to him unbecoming, to say the least, and uncalled for, as he had not run after her nor indeed made any advances to her at all.

"I will fix you," he said, "when I get some hold over you."

But in the calm awakening of this morning the spell of the woman had relaxed. Resolutely he thought, "Keep two dates with her. This one tonight at her house. It won't count, because nothing can be done. For I intend neither to allow myself to be assaulted nor to attempt an assault. I certainly have no desire to be caught by Chantelouve in, and probably get into a shooting scrape and be haled into police court. Have her here once. If she does not yield then, why, the matter is closed. She can go and tickle somebody else."

And he made a hearty breakfast, and sat down to his writing table and ran over the scattered notes for his book.

"I had got," he said, glancing at his last chapter, "to where the alchemic experiments and diabolic evocations have proved unavailing. Prelati, Blanchet, all the sorcerers and sorcerers' helpers whom the Marshal has about him, admit that to bring Satan to him Gilles must make over his soul and body to the Devil or commit crimes.

"Gilles refuses to alienate his existence and sell his soul, but he contemplates murder without any horror. This man, so brave on the battlefield, so courageous when he accompanied Jeanne d'Arc, trembles before the Devil and is afraid when he thinks of eternity and of Christ. The same is true of his accomplices. He has made them swear on the Testament to keep the secret of the confounding turpitudes which the château conceals, and he can be sure that not one will violate the oath, for, in the Middle Ages, the most reckless of freebooters would not commit the inexpiable sin of deceiving God.

"At the same time that his alchemists abandon their unfruitful furnaces, Gilles begins a course of systematic gluttony, and his flesh, set on fire by the essences of inordinate potations and spiced dishes, seethes in tumultuous eruption.

"Now, there are no women in the château. Gilles appears to have despised the sex ever since leaving the court. After experience of the ribalds of the camps and frequentation, with Xaintrailles and La Hire, of the prostitutes of Charles VII, it seems that a dislike for the feminine form came over him. Like others whose ideal of concupiscence is deteriorated and deviated, he certainly comes to be disgusted by the delicacy of the grain of the skin of women and by that odour of femininity which all sodomists abhor.

"He depraves the choir boys who are under his authority. He chose them in the first place, these little psaltry ministrants, for their beauty, and 'beautiful as angels' they are. They are the only ones he loves, the only ones he spares in his murderous transports.

"But soon infantile pollution seems to him an insipid delicacy. The law of Satanism which demands that the elect of Evil, once started, must go the whole way, is once more fulfilled. Gilles's soul must become thoroughly cankered, a red tabernacle, that in it the Very Low may dwell at ease.

"The litanies of lust arise in an atmosphere that is like the wind over a slaughter house. The first victim is a very small boy whose name we do not know. Gilles disembowels him, and, cutting off the hands and tearing out the eyes and heart, carries these members into Prelati's chamber. The two men offer them, with passionate objurgations, to the Devil, who holds his peace. Gilles, confounded, flees. Prelati rolls up the poor remains in linen and, trembling, goes out at night to bury them in consecrated ground beside a chapel dedicated to Saint Vincent.

"Gilles preserves the blood of this child to write formulas of evocation and conjurements. It manures a horrible crop. Not long afterward the Marshal reaps the most abundant harvest of crimes that has ever been sown.

"From 1432 to 1440, that is to say during the eight years between the Marshal's retreat and his death, the inhabitants of Anjou, Poitou, and Brittany walk the highways wringing their hands. All the children disappear. Shepherd boys are abducted from the fields. Little girls coming out of school, little boys who have gone to play ball in the lanes or at the edge of the wood, return no more.

"In the course of an investigation ordered by the duke of Brittany, the scribes of Jean Touscheronde, duke's commissioner in these matters, compile interminable lists of lost children.

"Lost, at la Rochebernart, the child of the woman

"Lost, at Saint Etienne de Montluc, the son of Guillaume Brice, 'and this was a poor man and sought alms.'

"Lost, at Mâchecoul, the son of Georget le Barbier, 'who was seen, a certain day, knocking apples from a tree behind the hôtel Rondeau, and who since hath not been seen.'

"Lost, at Thonaye, the child of Mathelin Thouars, 'and he had been heard to cry and lament and the said child was about twelve years of age.'

"At Mâchecoul, again, the day of Pentecost, mother and father Sergent leave their eight-year-old boy at home, and when they return from the fields 'they did not find the said child of eight years of age, wherefore they marvelled and were exceeding grieved.'

"At Chantelou, it is Pierre Badieu, mercer of the parish, who says that a year or thereabouts ago, he saw, in the domain de Rais, 'two little children of the age of nine who were brothers and the children of Robin Pavot of the aforesaid place, and since that time neither have they been seen neither doth any know what hath become of them.'

"At Nantes, it is Jeanne Darel who deposes that 'on the day of the feast of the Holy Father, her true child named Olivier did stray from her, being of the age of seven and eight years, and since the day of the feast of the Holy Father neither did she see him nor hear tidings.'

"And the account of the investigation goes on, revealing hundreds of names, describing the grief of the mothers who interrogate passersby on the highway, and telling of the keening of the families from whose very homes children have been spirited away when the elders went to the fields to hoe or to sow the hemp. These phrases, like a desolate refrain, recur again and again, at the end of every deposition: 'They were seen complaining dolorously,' 'Exceedingly they did lament.' Wherever the bloodthirsty Gilles dwells the women weep.

"At first the frantic people tell themselves that evil

"These emissaries spread out, covering all the villages and hamlets, tracking the children down at the orders of the Chief Huntsman, the sire de Bricqueville. Not content with these beaters, Gilles takes to standing at a window of the château, and when young mendicants, attracted by the renown of his bounty, ask an alms, he runs an appraising eye over them, has any who excite his lust brought in and thrown into an underground prison and kept there until, being in appetite, he is pleased to order a carnal supper.

"How many children did he disembowel after deflowering them? He himself did not know, so many were the rapes he had consummated and the murders he had committed. The texts of the times enumerate between seven and eight hundred, but the estimate is inaccurate and seems overconservative. Entire regions were devastated. The hamlet of Tiffauges had no more young men. La Suze was without male posterity. At Champtocé the whole foundation room of a tower was filled with corpses. A witness cited in the inquest, Guillaume Hylairet, declared also, "that one hight

"Even today traces of these assassinations linger. Two years ago at Tiffauges a physician discovered an oubliette and brought forth piles of skulls and bones.

"Gilles confessed to frightful holocausts, and his friends confirmed the atrocious details.

"At dusk, when their senses are phosphorescent, enkindled by inflammatory spiced beverages and by 'high' venison, Gilles and his friends retire to a distant chamber of the château. The little boys are brought from their cellar prisons to this room. They are disrobed and gagged. The Marshal fondles them and forces them. Then he hacks them to pieces with a dagger, taking great pleasure in slowly dismembering them. At other times he slashes the boy's chest and drinks the breath from the lungs; sometimes he opens the stomach also, smells it, enlarges the incision with his hands, and seats himself in it. Then while he macerates the warm entrails in mud, he turns half around and looks over his shoulder to contemplate the supreme convulsions, the last spasms. He himself says afterwards, 'I was happier in the enjoyment of tortures, tears, fright, and blood, than in any other pleasure.'

"Then he becomes weary of these fecal joys. An unpublished passage in his trial proceedings informs us that 'The said sire heated himself with little boys, sometimes also with little girls, with whom he had congress in the belly, saying that he had more pleasure and less pain than acting in nature.' After which, he slowly saws their throats, cuts them to pieces, and the corpses, the linen and the clothing, are put in the fireplace, where a smudge fire of logs and leaves is burning, and the ashes are thrown into the latrine, or scattered to the winds from the top of a tower, or buried in the moats and mounds.

"Soon his furies become aggravated. Until now he has appeased the rage of his senses with living or moribund

"Vampirism satisfies him for months. He pollutes dead children, appeasing the fever of his desires in the blood smeared chill of the tomb. He even goes so far—one day when his supply of children is exhausted—as to disembowel a pregnant woman and sport with the fœtus. After these excesses he falls into horrible states of coma, similar to those heavy lethargies which overpowered Sergeant Bertrand after his violations of the grave. But if that leaden sleep is one of the known phases of ordinary vampirism, if Gilles de Rais was merely a sexual pervert, we must admit that he distinguished himself from the most delirious sadists, the most exquisite virtuosi in pain and murder, by a detail which seems extrahuman, it is so horrible.

"As these terrifying atrocities, these monstrous outrages, no longer suffice him, he corrodes them with the essence of a rare sin. It is no longer the resolute, sagacious cruelty of the wild beast playing with the body of a victim. His ferocity does not remain merely carnal; it becomes spiritual. He wishes to make the child suffer both in body and soul. By a thoroughly Satanic cheat he deceives gratitude, dupes affection, and desecrates love. At a leap he passes the bounds of human infamy and lands plump in the darkest depth of Evil.

"He contrives this: One of the unfortunate children is brought into his chamber, and hanged, by Bricqueville, Prelati, and de Sillé, to a hook fixed into the wall. Just at the moment when the child is suffocating, Gilles orders him to be taken down and the rope untied. With some precaution, he takes the child on his knees, revives him, caresses him, rocks him, dries his tears, and pointing to the

"After these abominable pastimes he may well believe that the art of the charnalist has beneath his fingers expressed its last drop of pus, and in a vaunting cry he says to his troop of parasites, 'There is no man on earth who dare do as I have done.'

"But if in Love and Well-doing the infinite is approachable for certain souls, the out-of-the-world possibilities of Evil are limited. In his excesses of stupration and murder the Marshal cannot go beyond a fixed point. In vain he may dream of unique violations, of more ingenious slow tortures, but human imagination has a limit and he has already reached it—even passed it, with diabolic aid. Insatiable he seethes—there is nothing material in which to express his ideal. He can verify that axiom of demonographers, that the Evil One dupes all persons who give themselves, or are willing to give themselves, to him.

"As he can descend no further, he tries returning on the way by which he has come, but now remorse overtakes him, overwhelms him, and wrenches him without respite. His nights are nights of expiation. Besieged by phantoms, he howls like a wounded beast. He is found rushing along the solitary corridors of the château. He weeps, throws himself on his knees, swears to God that he will do penance. He promises to found pious institutions. He does establish, at Mâchecoul, a boys' academy in honour of the Holy Innocents. He speaks of shutting himself up in a cloister, of going to Jerusalem, begging his bread on the way.

"

"He wanders in the forests surrounding Tiffauges, dark, impenetrable forests like those which Brittany still can show at Carnoet. He sobs as he walks along. He attempts to thrust aside the phantoms which accost him. Then he looks about him and beholds obscenity in the shapes of the aged trees. It seems that nature perverts itself before him, that his very presence depraves it. For the first time he understands the motionless lubricity of trees. He discovers priapi in the branches.

"Here a tree appears to him as a living being, standing on its root-tressed head, its limbs waving in the air and spread wide apart, subdivided and re-subdivided into haunches, which again are divided and re-subdivided. Here between two limbs another branch is jammed, in a stationary fornication which is reproduced in diminished scale from bough to twig to the top of the tree. There it seems the trunk is a phallus which mounts and disappears into a skirt of leaves or which, on the contrary, issues from a green clout and plunges into the glossy belly of the earth.

"Frightful images rise before him. He sees the skin of little boys, the lucid white skin, vellum-like, in the pale, smooth bark of the slender beeches. He recognizes the pachydermatous skin of the beggar boys in the dark and

"Everywhere obscene forms rise from the ground and spring, disordered, into a firmament which satanizes. The clouds swell into breasts, divide into buttocks, bulge as if with fecundity, scattering a train of spawn through space. They accord with the sombre bulging of the foliage, in which now there are only images of giant or dwarf hips, feminine triangles, great V's, mouths of Sodom, glowing cicatrices, humid vents. This landscape of abomination changes. Gilles now sees on the trunks frightful cancers and horrible wens. He observes exostoses and ulcers, membranous sores, tubercular chancres, atrocious caries. It is an arboreal lazaret, a venereal clinic.

"And there, at a detour of the forest aisle, stands a mottled red beech.

"Amid the sanguinary falling leaves he feels that he has been spattered by a shower of blood. He goes into a rage. He conceives the delusion that beneath the bark lives a wood nymph, and he would feel with his hands the palpitant flesh of the goddess, he would trucidate the Dryad, violate her in a place unknown to the follies of men.

"He is jealous of the woodman who can murder, can massacre, the trees, and he raves. Tensely he listens and hears in the soughing wind a response to his cries of desire. Overwhelmed, he resumes his walk, weeping, until he arrives at the château and sinks to his bed exhausted, an inert mass.

"The phantoms take more definite shape, now that he sleeps. The lubric enlacements of the branches, dilated crevices and cleft mosses, the coupling of the diverse beings

"The corpses of his victims, reduced to ashes and scattered, return to the larva state and attack his lower parts. He writhes, with the blood bursting his veins. He rebounds in a somersault, then he crawls to the crucifix, like a wolf, on all fours, and howling, strains his lips to the feet of the Christ.

"A sudden reaction overwhelms him. He trembles before the image whose convulsed face looks down on him. He adjures Christ to have pity, supplicates Him to spare a sinner, and sobs and weeps, and when, incapable of further effort, he whimpers, he hears, terrified, in his own voice, the lamentations of the children crying for their mothers and pleading for mercy."

And Durtal, coming slowly out of the vision he had conjured up, closed his notebook and remarked, "Rather petty, my own spiritual conflict regarding a woman whose sin—like my own, to be sure—is commonplace and bourgeois."

"Easy to find an excuse for this visit, though it will seem strange to Chantelouve, whom I have neglected for months," said Durtal on his way toward the rue Bagneux. "Supposing he is home this evening—and he probably isn't, because surely Hyacinthe will have seen to that—I can tell him that I have learned of his illness through Des Hermies and that I have come to see how he is getting along."

He paused on the stoop of the building in which Chantelouve lived. At each side and over the door were these antique lamps with reflectors, surmounted by a sort of casque of sheet iron painted green. There was an old iron balustrade, very wide, and the steps, with wooden sides, were paved with red tile. About this house there was a sepulchral and also clerical odour, yet there was also something homelike—though a little too imposing—about it such as is not to be found in the cardboard houses they build nowadays. You could see at a glance that it did not harbour the apartment house promiscuities: decent, respectable couples with kept women for neighbours. The house pleased him, and he considered Hyacinthe the more desirable for her substantial environment.

He rang at a first-floor apartment. A maid led him through a long hall into a sitting-room. He noticed, at a glance, that nothing had changed since his last visit. It was the same vast, high-ceilinged room with windows reaching to heaven. There was the huge fireplace; on the mantelpiece the same reproduction, reduced, in bronze, of Fremiet's Jeanne d'Arc, between the two globe lamps of Japanese

"Stinks of the sacristy!" Durtal was saying to himself at the moment the door opened.

Mme. Chantelouve entered, the lines of her figure advantageously displayed by a wrapper of white swanskin, which gave off a fragrance of frangipane. She pressed Durtal's hand and sat down facing him, and he perceived under the wrap her indigo silk stockings in little patent leather bootines with straps across the insteps.

They talked about the weather. She complained of the way the winter hung on, and declared that although the furnace seemed to be working all right she was always shivering, was always frozen to death. She told him to feel her hands, which indeed were cold, then she seemed worried about his health.

"You look pale," she said.

"You might at least say that I am pale," he replied.

She did not answer immediately, then, "Yesterday I saw how much you desire me," she said. "But why, why, want to go so far?"

He made a gesture, indicating vague annoyance.

"How funny you are!" she went on. "I was re-reading one of your books today, and I noticed this phrase, 'The only women you can continue to love are those you lose.' Now admit that you were right when you wrote that."

"It all depends. I wasn't in love then."

She shrugged her shoulders. "Well," she said, "I must tell my husband you are here."

Durtal remained silent, wondering what rôle Chantelouve actually played in this triangle.

Chantelouve returned with his wife. He was in his dressing-gown and had a pen in his mouth. He took it out and put it on the table, and after assuring Durtal that his health was completely restored, he complained of overwhelming labours. "I have had to quit giving dinners and receptions," he said, "I can't even go visiting. I am in harness every day at my desk."

And when Durtal asked him the nature of these labours, he confessed to a whole series of unsigned volumes on the lives of the saints, to be turned out by the gross by a Tours firm for exportation.

"Yes," said his wife, laughing, "and these are sadly neglected saints whose biographies he is preparing."

And as Durtal looked at him inquiringly, Chantelouve, also laughing, said, "It was their persons that were sadly neglected. The subjects are chosen for me, and it does seem as if the publisher enjoyed making me eulogize frowziness. I have to describe Blessed Saints most of whom were deplorably unkempt: Labre, who was so lousy and ill-smelling as to disgust the beasts in the stables; Saint Cunegonde who 'through humility' neglected her body; Saint Oportune who never used water and who washed her bed only with her tears; Saint Silvia who never removed the grime from her face; Saint Radegonde who never changed her hair shirt and who slept on a cinder pile; and how many others, around whose heads I must draw a golden halo!"

"There are worse than those," said Durtal. "Read the

"I know, but I must admit that I am less touched than revolted by these tales."

"I prefer Saint Lucius the martyr," said Mme. Chantelouve. "His body was so transparent that he could see through his chest the vileness of his heart. His kind of 'vileness' at least we can stand. But I must admit that this utter disregard of cleanliness makes me suspicious of the monasteries and renders your beloved Middle Ages odious to me."

"Pardon me, my dear," said her husband, "you are greatly mistaken. The Middle Ages were not, as you believe, an epoch of uncleanliness. People frequented the baths assiduously. At Paris, for example, where these establishments were numerous, the 'stove-keepers' went about the city announcing that the water was hot. It is not until the Renaissance that uncleanliness becomes rife in France. When you think that that delicious Reine Margot kept her body macerated with perfumes but as grimy as the inside of a stovepipe! and that Henri Quatre plumed himself on having 'reeking feet and a fine armpit.'"

"My dear, for heaven's sake," said madame, "spare us the details."

While Chantelouve was speaking, Durtal was watching him. He was small and rotund, with a bay window which his arms would not have gone around. He had rubicund cheeks, long hair very much pomaded, trailing in the back and drawn up in crescents along his temples. He had pink cotton in his ears. He was smooth shaven and looked like a pious but convivial notary. But his quick, calculating eye belied his jovial and sugary mien. One divined in his look the cool, unscrupulous man of affairs, capable, for all his honeyed ways, of doing one a bad turn.

"He must be aching to throw me into the street," said

But if Chantelouve wished to be rid of his guest he did not show it. With his legs crossed and his hands folded one over the other, in the attitude of a priest, he appeared to be mightily interested in Durtal's work. Inclining a little, listening as if in a theatre, he said, "Yes, I know the material on the subject. I read a book some time ago about Gilles de Rais which seemed to me well handled. It was by abbé Bossard."

"It is the most complete and reliable of the biographies of the Marshal."

"But," Chantelouve went on, "there is one point which I never have been able to understand. I have never been able to explain to myself why the name Bluebeard should have been attached to the Marshal, whose history certainly has no relation to the tale of the good Perrault."

"As a matter of fact the real Bluebeard was not Gilles de Rais, but probably a Breton king, Comor, a fragment of whose castle, dating from the sixth century, is still standing, on the confines of the forest of Carnoet. The legend is simple. The king asked Guerock, count of Vannes, for the hand of his daughter, Triphine. Guerock refused, because he had heard that the king maintained himself in a constant state of widowerhood by cutting his wives' throats. Finally Saint Gildas promised Guerock to return his daughter to him safe and sound when he should reclaim her, and the union was celebrated.

"Some months later Triphine learned that Comor did indeed kill his consorts as soon as they became pregnant. She was big with child, so she fled, but her husband pursued her and cut her throat. The weeping father commanded Saint Gildas to keep his promise, and the Saint resuscitated Triphine.

"As you see, this legend comes much nearer than the history of our Bluebeard to the told tale arranged by the

"But with your Gilles de Rais you must have to plunge into Satanism right up to the hilt," said Chantelouve after a silence.

"Yes, and it would really be more interesting if these scenes were not so remote. What would have a timely appeal would be a study of the Diabolism of the present day."

"No doubt," said Chantelouve, pleasantly.

"For," Durtal went on, looking at him intently, "unheard-of things are going on right now. I have heard tell of sacrilegious priests, of a certain canon who has revived the sabbats of the Middle Ages."

Chantelouve did not betray himself by so much as a flicker of the eyelids. Calmly he uncrossed his legs and looking up at the ceiling he said, "Alas, certain scabby wethers succeed in stealing into the fold, but they are so rare as hardly to be worth thinking about." And he deftly changed the subject by speaking of a book he had just read about the Fronde.

Durtal, somewhat embarrassed, said nothing. He understood that Chantelouve refused to speak of his relations with Canon Docre.

"My dear," said Mme. Chantelouve, addressing her husband, "you have forgotten to turn up your lamp wick. It is smoking. I can smell it from here, even through the closed door."

She was most evidently conveying him a dismissal. Chantelouve rose and, with a vaguely malicious smile, excused himself as being obliged to continue his work. He shook hands with Durtal, begged him not to stay away so long in future, and gathering up the skirts of his dressing-gown he left the room.

She followed him with her eyes, then rose, in her turn,

He grunted furiously.

She looked at him with indolent and filmy eyes, and he saw sparks of silver dart to their surface. He held her in his arms. She was swooning but vigilantly listening. Gently she disengaged herself, sighing, while he, embarrassed, sat down at a little distance from her, clenching and unclenching his hands.

They spoke of banal things: she boasting of her maid, who would go through fire for her, he responding only by gestures of approbation and surprise.

Then suddenly she passed her hands over her forehead. "Ah!" she said, "I suffer cruelly when I think that he is there working. No, it would cost me too much remorse. What I say is foolish, but if he were a different man, a man who went out more and made conquests, it would not be so bad."

He was irritated by the inconsequentiality of her plaints. Finally, feeling completely safe, he came closer to her and said, "You spoke of remorse, but whether we embark or whether we stand on the bank, isn't our guilt exactly the same?"

"Yes, I know. My confessor talks to me like that—only more severely—but I think you are both wrong."

He could not help laughing, and he said to himself, "Remorse is perhaps the condiment which keeps passion from being too unappetizing to the blasé." Then aloud he jestingly, "Speaking of confessors, if I were a casuist it seems to me I would try to invent new sins. I am not a casuist, and yet, having looked about a bit, I believe I have found a new sin."

"You?" she said, laughing in turn. "Can I commit it?"

He scrutinized her features. She had the expression of a greedy child.

"

"Do not keep me in suspense. What is this sin?"

"It isn't easy to explain. Nevertheless I will try. Lust, I believe, can be classified into: ordinary sin, sin against nature, bestiality, and let us add demoniality and sacrilege. Well, there is, in addition to these, what I shall call Pygmalionism, which embraces at the same time cerebral onanism and incest.

"Imagine an artist falling in love with his child, his creation: with an Hérodiade, a Judith, a Helen, a Jeanne d'Arc, whom he has either described or painted, and evoking her, and finally possessing her in dream.

"Well, this love is worse than normal incest. In the latter sin the guilty one commits only a half-offence, because his daughter is not born solely of his substance, but also of the flesh of another. Thus, logically, in incest there is a quasi-natural side, almost licit, because part of another person has entered into the engendering of the corpus delicti; while in Pygmalionism the father violates the child of his soul, of that which alone is purely and really his, which alone he can impregnate without the aid of another. The offence is, then, entire and complete. Now, is there not also disdain of nature, of the work of God, since the subject of the sin is no longer—as even in bestiality—a palpable and living creature, but an unreal being created by a projection of the desecrated talent, a being almost celestial, since, by genius, by artistry, it often becomes immortal?

"Let us go further, if you wish. Suppose that an artist depicts a saint and becomes enamoured of her. Thus we have complications of crime against nature and of sacrilege. An enormity!"

"Which, perhaps, is exquisite!"

He was taken aback by the word she had used. She rose, opened the door, and called her husband.

"Surely not," said Chantelouve, his figure framed in the doorway. "The book of sins is an edition ne varietur. New sins cannot be invented, but old ones may be kept from falling into oblivion. Well, what is this sin of his?"

Durtal explained the theory.

"But it is simply a refined expression of succubacy. The consort is not one's work become animate, but a succubus which by night takes that form."

"Admit, at any rate, that this cerebral hermaphrodism, self-fecundation, is a distinguished vice at least—being the privilege of the artist—a vice reserved for the elect, inaccessible to the mob."

"If you like exclusive obscenity—" laughed Chantelouve. "But I must get back to the lives of the saints; the atmosphere is fresher and more benign. So excuse me, Durtal. I leave it to my wife to continue this Marivaux conversation about Satanism with you."

He said it in the simplest, most debonair fashion to be imagined, but with just the slightest trace of irony.

Which Durtal perceived. "It must be quite late," he thought, when the door closed after Chantelouve. He consulted his watch. Nearly eleven. He rose to take leave.

"When shall I see you?" he murmured, very low.

"Your apartment tomorrow night at nine."

He looked at her with beseeching eyes. She understood, but wished to tease him. She kissed him maternally on the forehead, then consulted his eyes again. The expression of supplication must have remained unchanged, for she responded to their imploration by a long kiss which closed them, then came down to his lips, drinking their dolorous emotion.

Then she rang and told her maid to light Durtal through the hall. He descended, satisfied that she had engaged herself to yield tomorrow night.

He began again, as on the other evening, to clean house and establish a methodical disorder. He slipped a cushion under the false disarray of the armchair, then he made roaring fires to have the rooms good and warm when she came.

But he was without impatience. That silent promise which he had obtained, that Mme. Chantelouve would not leave him panting this night, moderated him. Now that his uncertainty was at an end, he no longer vibrated with the almost painful acuity which hitherto her malignant delays had provoked. He soothed himself by poking the fire. His mind was still full of her, but plethoric, content. When his thoughts stirred at all it was, at the very most, to revolve the question, "How shall I go about it, when the time comes, so as not to be ridiculous?" This question, which had so harassed him the other night, left him troubled but inert. He did not try to solve it, but decided to leave everything to chance, since the best planned strategy was almost always abortive.

Then he revolted against himself, accused himself of stagnation, and walked up and down to shake himself out of a torpor which might have been attributed to the hot fire. Well, well, was it because he had had to wait so long that his desires had left him, or at least quit bothering him—no, they had not, why, he was yearning now for the moment when he might crush that woman! He thought he had the explanation of his lack of enthusiasm in the stage fright inseparable from any beginning. "It will not be really exquisite tonight until after the newness wears off and the

The cat, sitting on the table, cocked up its ears, gazed at the door with its black eyes, and fled. The bell rang and Durtal went to let her in.

Her costume pleased him. He took off her furs. Her skirt was of a plum colour so dark that it was almost black, the material thick and supple, outlining her figure, squeezing her arms, making an hourglass of her waist, accentuating the curve of her hips and the bulge of her corset.

"You are charming," he said, kissing her wrists, and he was pleased to find that his lips had accelerated her pulse. She did not speak, could hardly breathe. She was agitated and very pale.

He sat down facing her. She looked at him with her mysterious, half sleepy eyes. He felt that he was falling in love all over again. He forgot his reasonings and his fears, and took acute pleasure in penetrating the mystery of these eyes and studying the vague smile of this dolorous mouth.

He enlaced her fingers in his, and for the first time, in a low voice, he called her Hyacinthe.

She listened, her breast heaving, her hands in a fever. Then in a supplicating voice, "I implore you," she said, "let us have none of that. Only desire is good. Oh, I am rational, I mean what I say. I thought it all out on the way here. I left him very sad tonight. If you knew how I feel—I went to church today and was afraid and hid myself when I saw my confessor—"

These plaints he had heard before, and he said to himself, "You may sing whatever tune you want to, but you shall dance tonight." Aloud he answered in monosyllables as he continued to take possession of her.

He rose, thinking she would do the same, or that if she remained seated he could better reach her lips by bending over her.

"Your lips, your lips—the kiss you gave me last night—" he murmured, as his face came close to hers. She put up her lips and stood, and they embraced, but as his hands went seeking she recoiled.

"Think how ridiculous it all is," she said in a low voice, "to undress, put on night clothes—and that silly scene, getting into bed!"

He avoided declaring, but attempted, by an embrace which bent her over backward, to make her understand that she could spare herself those embarrassments. Tacitly, in his own turn, feeling her body stiffen under his fingers, he understood that she absolutely would not give herself in the room here, in front of the fire.

"Oh well," she said, disengaging herself, "if you will have it!"

He made way to allow her to go into the other room, and seeing that she desired to be alone he drew the portière.

Sitting before the fire he reflected. Perhaps he ought to have pulled down the bed covers, and not left her the task, but without doubt the action would have been too direct, too obvious a hint. Ah! and that water heater! He took it and, keeping away from the bedroom door, went to the bathroom, placed the heater on the toilet table, and then, swiftly, he set out the rice powder box, the perfumes, the combs, and, returning into his study, he listened.

She was making as little noise as possible, walking on tiptoe as if in the presence of the dead. She blew out the candles, doubtless wishing no more light than the rosy glow of the hearth.

He felt positively annihilated. The irritating impression of the lips and eyes of Hyacinthe was far from him now. She was nothing but a woman, like any other, undressing in a man's room. Memories of similar scenes overwhelmed him. He remembered girls who like her had crept about on the carpet so as not to be heard, and who had stopped short, ashamed, for a whole second, if they bumped against the water pitcher. And then, what good was this going to

The frightened cat glided under the curtain, ran from one room to the other, and finally came back to his master and jumped onto his knees. Caressing him, Durtal said to himself, "Decidedly, she was right when she refused. It will be grotesque, atrocious. I was wrong to insist, but no, it's her fault, too. She must have wanted to do this or she wouldn't have come. What a fool to think she could aggravate passion by delay. She is fearfully clumsy. A moment ago when I was embracing her and really was aroused, it would perhaps have been delicious, but now! And what do I look like? A young bridegroom waiting—or a green country boy. Oh God, how stupid! Well," he said, straining his ears and hearing no sound from the other room, "she's in bed. I must go in.

"I suppose it took her all this time to unharness herself from her corset. She was a fool to wear one," he concluded, when, drawing the curtain, he stepped into the other room.

Mme. Chantelouve was buried under the thick coverlet, her mouth half-open and her eyes closed; but he saw that she was peering at him through the fringe of her blonde eyelashes. He sat down on the edge of the bed. She huddled up, drawing the cover over her chin.

"Cold, dear?"

"No," and she opened wide her eyes, which flashed sparks.

He undressed, casting a rapid glance at Hyacinthe's face. It was hidden in the darkness, but was sometimes revealed by a flare of the red hot fire, as a stick, half consumed and smouldering, would suddenly burst into flame. Swiftly he slipped between the covers. He clasped a corpse; a body so cold that it froze him, but the woman's lips were burning as she silently gnawed his features. He lay stupified in the grip of this body wound around his own, supple as the ...

"I detest you!" she exclaimed.

"Why?"

"I detest you!"

He wanted to cry out, "And I you!" He was exasperated, and would have given all he owned to get her to dress and go home.

The fire was burning low, unflickering. Appeased, now, he sat up and looked into the darkness. He would have liked to get up and find another nightshirt, because the one he had on was tearing and getting in his way. But Hyacinthe was lying on top of it—then he reflected that the bed was deranged and the thought affected him, because he liked to be snug in winter, and knowing himself incapable of respreading the covers, he foresaw a cold night.