"Come right in and get warm. Ah, messieurs, you must not do that any
more," said Mme. Carhaix, seeing Durtal draw from his pocket some
bottles wrapped in paper, while Des Hermies placed on the table some
little packages tied with twine. "You mustn't spend your money on us."
"Oh, but you see we enjoy doing it, Mme. Carhaix. And your husband?"
"He is in the tower. Since morning he has been going from one tantrum
into another."
"My, the cold is terrible today," said Durtal, "and I should think it
would be no fun up there."
"Oh, he isn't grumbling for himself but for his bells. Take off your
things."
They took off their overcoats and came up close to the stove.
"It isn't what you would call hot in here," said Mme. Carhaix, "but to
thaw this place you would have to keep a fire going night and day."
"Why don't you get a portable stove?"
"Oh, heavens! that would asphyxiate us."
"It wouldn't be very comfortable at any rate," said Des Hermies, "for
there is no chimney. You might get some joints of pipe and run them out
of the window, the way you have fixed this tubing. But, speaking of that
kind of apparatus, Durtal, doesn't it seem to you that those hideous
galvanized iron contraptions perfectly typify our utilitarian epoch?
"Just think, the engineer, offended by any object that hasn't a
sinister or ignoble form, reveals himself entire in this invention. He
tells us, 'You want heat. You shall have heat--and nothing else.'
Anything agreeable to the eye is out of the question. No more snapping,
crackling wood fire, no more gentle, pervasive warmth. The useful
without the fantastic. Ah, the beautiful jets of flame darting out from
a red cave of coals and spurting up over a roaring log."
"But there are lots of stoves where you can see the fire," objected
madame.
"Yes, and then it's worse yet. Fire behind a grated window of mica.
Flame in prison. Depressing! Ah, those fine fires of faggots and dry
vine stocks out in the country. They smell good and they cast a golden
glow over everything. Modern life has set that in order. The luxury of
the poorest of peasants is impossible in Paris except for people who
have copious incomes."
The bell-ringer entered. Every hair of his bristling moustache was
beaded with a globule of snow. With his knitted bonnet, his sheepskin
coat, his fur mittens and goloshes, he resembled a Samoyed, fresh from
the pole.
"I won't shake hands," he said, "for I am covered with grease and oil.
What weather! Just think, I've been scouring the bells ever since early
this morning. I'm worried about them."
"Why?"
"Why! You know very well that frost contracts the metal and sometimes
cracks or breaks it. Some of these bitterly cold winters we have lost a
good many, because bells suffer worse than we do in bad weather.--Wife,
is there any hot water in the other room, so I can wash up?"
"Can't we help you set the table?" Des Hermies proposed.
But the good woman refused. "No, no, sit down. Dinner is ready."
"Mighty appetizing," said Durtal, inhaling the odour of a peppery
_pot-au-feu_, perfumed with a symphony of vegetables, of which the
keynote was celery.
"Everybody sit down," said Carhaix, reappearing with a clean blouse on,
his face shining of soap and water.
They sat down. The glowing stove purred. Durtal felt the sudden
relaxation of a chilly soul dipped into a warm bath: at Carhaix's one
was so far from Paris, so remote from the epoch....
The lodge was poor, but cosy, comfortable, cordial. The very table, set
country style, the polished glasses, the covered dish of sweet butter,
the cider pitcher, the somewhat battered lamp casting reflections of
tarnished silver on the great cloth, contributed to the atmosphere of
home.
"Next time I come I must stop at the English store and buy a jar of that
reliable orange marmalade," said Durtal to himself, for by common
consent with Des Hermies he never dined with the bell-ringer without
furnishing a share of the provisions. Carhaix set out a _pot-au-feu_ and
a simple salad and poured his cider. Not to be an expense to him, Des
Hermies and Durtal brought wine, coffee, liquor, desserts, and managed
so that their contributions would pay for the soup and the beef which
would have lasted for several days if the Carhaixes had eaten alone.
"This time I did it!" said Mme. Carhaix triumphantly, serving to each in
turn a mahogany-colour bouillon whose iridescent surface was looped with
rings of topaz.
It was succulent and unctuous, robust and yet delicate, flavoured as it
was with the broth of a whole flock of boiled chickens. The diners were
silent now, their noses in their plates, their faces brightened by steam
from the savoury soup, two selected dishes, a salad, and a dessert.
"Now is the time to repeat the chestnut dear to Flaubert, 'You can't
dine like this in a restaurant,'" said Durtal.
"Let's not malign the restaurants," said Des Hermies. "They afford a
very special delight to the person who has the instinct of the
inspector. I had an opportunity to gratify this instinct just the other
night. I was returning from a call on a patient, and I dropped into one
of these establishments where for the sum of three francs you are
entitled to soup, two selected dishes, a salad, and a dessert.
"The restaurant, where I go as often as once a month, has an unvarying
clientele, hostile highbrows, officers in mufti, members of Parliament,
bureaucrats.
"While laboriously gnawing my way through a redoubtable sole with sauce
au gratin, I examined the habitués seated all around me and I found them
singularly altered since my last visit. They had become bony or bloated;
their eyes were either hollow, with violet rings around them, or puffy,
with crimson pouches beneath; the fat people had become yellow and the
thin ones were turning green.
"More deadly than the forgotten venefices of the days of the Avignon
papacy, the terrible preparations served in this place were slowly
poisoning its customers.
"It was interested, as you may believe. I made myself the subject of a
course of toxicological research, and, studying my food as it went down,
I identified the frightful ingredients masking the mixtures of tannin
and powdered carbon with which the fish was embalmed; and I penetrated
the disguise of the marinated meats, painted with sauces the colour of
sewage; and I diagnosed the wine as being coloured with fuscin, perfumed
with furfurol, and enforced with molasses and plaster.
"I have promised myself to return every month to register the slow but
sure progress of these people toward the tomb."
"Oh!" cried Mme. Carhaix.
"And you will claim," said Durtal, "that you aren't Satanic?"
"See, Carhaix, he's at it already. He won't even give us time to get our
breath, but must be dogging us about Satanism. It's true I promised him
I'd try and get you to tell us something about it tonight. Yes,"
continued Des Hermies, in response to Carhaix's look of astonishment,
"yesterday, Durtal, who is engaged, as you know, in writing a history of
Gilles de Rais, declared that he possessed all the information there was
about Diabolism in the Middle Ages. I asked him if he had any material
on the Satanism of the present day. He asked me what I was talking
about, and wouldn't believe that these practices are being carried on
right now."
"But they are," replied Carhaix, becoming grave. "It is only too true."
"Before we go any further, there is one question I'd like to put to Des
Hermies," said Durtal. "Can you, honestly, without joking, without
letting that saturnine smile play around the corner of your mouth, tell
me, in perfectly good faith, whether you do or do not believe in
Catholicism?"
"He!" exclaimed the bell-ringer. "Why, he's worse than an unbeliever,
he's a heresiarch."
"The fast is, if I were certain of anything, I would be inclined toward
Manicheism," said Des Hermies. "It's one of the oldest and it is _the_
simplest of religions, and it best explains the abominable mess
everything is in at the present time.
"The Principle of Good and the Principle of Evil, the God of Light and
the God of Darkness, two rivals, are fighting for our souls. That's at
least clear. Right now it is evident that the Evil God has the upper
hand and is reigning over the world as master. Now--and on this point,
Carhaix, who is distressed by these theories, can't reprehend me--I am
for the under dog. That's a generous and perfectly proper idea."
"But Manicheism is impossible!" cried the bell-ringer. "Two infinities
cannot exist together."
"But nothing can exist if you get to reasoning. The moment you argue the
Catholic dogma everything goes to pieces. The proof that two infinities
can coexist is that this idea passes beyond reason and enters the
category of those things referred to in Ecclesiasticus: 'Inquire not
into things higher than thou, for many things have shown themselves to
be above the sense of men.'
"Manicheism, you see, must have had some good in it, because it was
bathed in blood. At the end of the twelfth century thousands of
Albigenses were roasted for practising this doctrine. Of course, I
can't say that the Manicheans didn't abuse their cult, mostly made up of
devil worship, because we know very well they did.
"On this point I am not with them," he went on slowly, after a silence.
He was waiting till Mme. Carhaix, who had got up to remove the plates,
should go out of the room to fetch the beef.
"While we are alone," he said, seeing her disappear through the stairway
door, "I can tell you what they did. An excellent man named Psellus has
revealed to us, in a book entitled _De operatione Dæmonum_, the fact
that they tasted of the two excrements at the beginning of their
ceremonial, and that they mixed human semen with the host."
"Horrible!" exclaimed Carhaix.
"Oh, as they took both kinds of communion, they did better than that,"
returned Des Hermies. "They cut children's throats and mixed the blood
with ashes, and this paste, dissolved in liquid, constituted the
Eucharistic wine."
"You bring us right back to Satanism," said Durtal.
"Why, yes, as you see, I haven't strayed off your subject."
"I am sure Monsieur Des Hermies has been saying something awful,"
murmured Mme. Carhaix as she came in, bearing a platter on which was a
piece of beef smothered in vegetables.
"Oh, Madame," protested Des Hermies.
They burst out laughing and Carhaix cut up the meat, while his wife
poured the cider and Durtal uncorked the bottle of anchovies.
"I am afraid it's cooked too much," said the woman, who was a great deal
more interested in the beef than in other-world adventures, and she
added the famous maxim of housekeepers, "When the broth is good the beef
won't cut."
The men protested that it wasn't stringy a bit, it was cooked just
right.
"Have an anchovy and a little butter with your meat, Monsieur Durtal."
"Wife, let's have some of the red cabbage that you preserved," said
Carhaix, whose pale face was lighted up while his great canine eyes were
becoming suspiciously moist. Visibly he was jubilant. He was at table
with friends, in his tower, safe from the cold. "But, empty your
glasses. You are not drinking," he said, holding up the cider pot.
"Let's see, Des Hermies, you were claiming yesterday that Satanism has
pursued an uninterrupted course since the Middle Ages," said Durtal,
wishing to get back to the subject which haunted him.
"Yes, and the documents are irrefutable. I'll put you into a position to
prove them whenever you wish.
"At the end of the fifteenth century, that is to say at the time of
Gilles de Rais--to go no further back--Satanism had assumed the
proportions that you know. In the sixteenth it was worse yet. No need to
remind you, I think, of the demoniac pactions of Catherine de Medici and
of the Valois, of the trial of the monk Jean de Vaulx, of the
investigations of the Sprengers and the Lancres and those learned
inquisitors who had thousands of necromancers and sorcerers roasted
alive. All that is known, too well known. One case is not too well known
for me to cite here: that of the priest Benedictus who cohabited with
the she-devil Armellina and consecrated the hosts holding them upside
down. Here are the diabolical threads which bind that century to this.
In the seventeenth century, in which the sorcery trials continue, and in
which the 'possessed' of Loudun appear, the black religion nourishes,
but already it has been driven under cover.
"I will cite you an example, one among many, if you like.
"A certain abbé Guibourg made a specialty of these abominations. On a
table serving as tabernacle a woman lay down, naked or with her skirts
lifted up over her head, and with her arms outstretched. She held the
altar lights during the whole office.
"Guibourg thus celebrated masses on the abdomen of Mme. de Montespan, of
Mme. d'Argenson, of Mme. de Saint-Pont. As a matter of fact these
masses were very frequent under the Grand Monarch. Numbers of women went
to them as in our times women flock to have their fortunes told with
cards.
"The ritual of these ceremonies was sufficiently atrocious. Generally a
child was kidnapped and burnt in a furnace out in the country somewhere,
the ashes were saved and mixed with the blood of another child whose
throat had been cut, and of this mixture a paste was made resembling
that of the Manicheans of which I was speaking. Abbé Guibourg
officiated, consecrated the host, cut it into little pieces and mixed it
with this mixture of blood and ashes. That was the material of the
Sacrament."
"What a horrible priest!" cried Mme. Carhaix, indignant.
"Yes, he celebrated another kind of mass, too, that abbé did. It was
called--hang it--it's unpleasant to say--"
"Say it, Monsieur des Hermies. When people have as great a hatred for
that sort of thing as we here, they need not blink any fact. It isn't
that kind of thing which is going to take me away from my prayers."
"Nor me," added her husband.
"Well, this sacrifice was called the Spermatic Mass."
"Oh!"
"Guibourg, wearing the alb, the stole, and the maniple, celebrated this
mass with the sole object of making pastes to conjure with. The archives
of the Bastille inform us that he acted thus at the request of a lady
named Des Oeillettes:
"This woman, who was indisposed, gave some of her blood; the man who
accompanied her stood patiently beside the bed where the scene took
place, and Guibourg gathered up some of his semen into the chalice, then
added powdered blood and some flour, and after sacrilegious ceremonies
the Des Oeillettes woman departed bearing her paste."
"My heavenly Saviour!" sighed the bell-ringer's wife, "what a lot of
filth."
"But," said Durtal, "in the Middle Ages the mass was celebrated in a
different fashion. The altar then was the naked buttocks of a woman; in
the seventeenth century it was the abdomen, and now?"
"Nowadays a woman is hardly ever used for an altar, but let us not
anticipate. In the eighteenth century we shall again find abbés--among
how many other monsters--who defile holy objects. One Canon Duer
occupied himself specially with black magic and the evocation of the
devil. He was finally executed as a sorcerer in the year of grace 1718.
There was another who believed in the Incarnation of the Holy Ghost as
the Paraclete, and who, in Lombary, which he stirred up to a feverish
pitch of excitement, ordained twelve apostles and twelve apostolines to
preach his gospel. This man, abbé Beccarelli, like all the other priests
of his ilk, abused both sexes, and he said mass without confessing
himself of his lecheries. As his cult grew he began to celebrate
travestied offices in which he distributed to his congregation
aphrodisiac pills presenting this peculiarity, that after having
swallowed them the men believed themselves changed into women and the
women into men.
"The recipe for these hippomanes is lost," continued Des Hermies with
almost a sad smile. "To make a long story short, Beccarelli met with a
very miserable end. He was prosecuted for sacrilege and sentenced, in
1708, to row in the galleys for seven years."
"These frightful stories seem to have taken away your appetite," said
Mme. Carhaix. "Come, Monsieur des Hermies, a little more salad?"
"No, thanks. But now we've come to the cheese, I think it's time to open
the wine," and he uncapped one of the bottles which Durtal had brought.
"It's a light Chinon wine, but not too weak. I discovered it in a little
shop down by the quay," said Durtal.
"I see," he went on after a silence, "that the tradition of unspeakable
crimes has been maintained by worthy successors of Gilles de Rais. I see
that in all centuries there have been fallen priests who have dared
commit sins against the Holy Ghost. But at the present time it all seems
incredible. Surely nobody is cutting children's throats as in the days
of Bluebeard and of abbé Guibourg."
"You mean that nobody is brought to justice for doing it. They don't
assassinate now, but they kill designated victims by methods unknown to
official science--ah, if the confessionals could speak!" cried the
bell-ringer.
"But tell me, what class of people are these modern covenanters with the
Devil?"
"Prelates, abbesses, mission superiors, confessors of communities; and
in Rome, the centre of present-day magic, they're the very highest
dignitaries," answered Des Hermies. "As for the laymen, they are
recruited from the wealthy class. That explains why these scandals are
hushed up if the police chance to discover them.
"Then, let us assume that the sacrifices to the Devil are not preceded
by preliminary murders. Perhaps in some cases they aren't. The
worshippers probably content themselves with bleeding a foetus which had
been aborted as soon as it became matured to the point necessary.
Bloodletting is supererogatory anyway, and serves merely to whet the
appetite. The main business is to consecrate the host and put it to an
infamous use. The rest of the procedure varies. There is at present no
regular ritual for the black mass."
"Well, then, is a priest absolutely essential to the celebration of
these offices?"
"Certainly. Only a priest can operate the mystery of Transubstantiation.
I know there are certain occultists who claim to have been consecrated
by the Lord, as Saint Paul was, and who think they can consummate a
veritable sacrifice just like a real priest. Absurd! But even in default
of real masses with ordained celebrants, the people possessed by the
mania of sacrilege do none the less realize the sacred stupration of
which they dream.
"Listen to this. In 1855 there existed at Paris an association composed
of women, for the most part. These women took communion several times a
day and retained the sacred wafer in their mouths to be spat out later
and trodden underfoot or soiled by disgusting contacts."
"You are sure of it?"
"Perfectly. These facts were revealed by a religious journal, _Les
annales de la sainteté_, and the archbishop of Paris could not deny
them. I add that in 1874 women were likewise enrolled at Paris to
practise this odious commerce. They were paid so much for every wafer
they brought in. That explains why they presented themselves at the
sacred table of different churches every day."
"And that is not the half of it! Look," said Carhaix, in his turn,
rising and taking from his bookshelf a blue brochurette. "Here is a
review, _La voix de la septaine_, dated 1843. It informs us that for
twenty-five years, at Agen, a Satanistic association regularly
celebrated black masses, and committed murder, and polluted three
thousand three hundred and twenty hosts! And Monsignor the Bishop of
Agen, who was a good and ardent prelate, never dared deny the
monstrosities committed in his diocese!"
"Yes, we can say it among ourselves," Des Hermies returned, "in the
nineteenth century the number of foul-minded abbés has been legion.
Unhappily, though the documents are certain, they are difficult to
verify, for no ecclesiastic boasts of such misdeeds. The celebrants of
Deicidal masses dissemble and declare themselves devoted to Christ. They
even affirm that they defend Him by exorcising the possessed.
"That's a good one. The 'possessed' are made so or kept so by the
priests themselves, who are thus assured of subjects and accomplices,
especially in the convents. All kinds of murderous and sadistic follies
can be covered with the antique and pious mantle of exorcism."
"Let us be just," said Carhaix. "The Satanist would not be complete if
he were not an abominable hypocrite."
"Hypocrisy and pride are perhaps the most characteristic vices of the
perverse priest," suggested Durtal.
"But in the long run," Des Hermies went on, "in spite of the most
adroit precautions, everything comes out. Up to now I have spoken only
of local Satanistic associations, but there are others, more extensive,
which ravage the old world and the new, for Diabolism is quite up to
date in one respect. It is highly centralized and very capably
administered. There are committees, subcommittees, a sort of curia,
which rules America and Europe, like the curia of a pope.
"The biggest of these societies founded as long ago as 1855 is the
society of the Re-Theurgistes-Optimates. Beneath an apparent unity it is
divided into two camps, one aspiring to destroy the universe and reign
over the ruins, the other thinking simply of imposing upon the world a
demoniac cult of which it shall be high priest.
"This society has its seat in America. It was formerly directed by one
Longfellow, an adventurer, born in Scotland, who entitled himself grand
priest of the New Evocative Magism. For a long time it has had branches
in France, Italy, Germany, Russia, Austria, even Turkey.
"It is at the present moment moribund, or perhaps quite dead, but
another has just been created. The object of this one is to elect an
antipope who will be the exterminating Antichrist. And those are only
two of them. How many others are there, more or less important
numerically, more or less secret, which, by common accord, at ten
o'clock the morning of the Feast of the Holy Sacrament, celebrate black
masses at Paris, Rome, Bruges, Constantinople, Nantes, Lyons, and in
Scotland--where sorcerers swarm!
"Then, outside of these universal associations and local assemblies,
isolated cases abound, on which little light can be shed, and that with
great difficulty. Some years ago there died, in a state of penitence, a
certain comte de Lautree, who presented several churches with statues
which he had bewitched so as to satanize the faithful. At Bruges a
priest of my acquaintance contaminates the holy ciboria and uses them to
prepare spells and conjurements. Finally one may, among all these, cite
a clear case of possession. It is the case of Cantianille, who in 1865
turned not only the city of Auxerre, but the whole diocese of Sens,
upside down.
"This Cantianille, placed in a convent of Mont-Saint-Sulpice, was
violated, when she was barely fifteen years old, by a priest who
dedicated her to the Devil. This priest himself had been corrupted, in
early childhood, by an ecclesiastic belonging to a sect of possessed
which was created the very day Louis XVI was guillotined.
"What happened in this convent, where many nuns, evidently mad with
hysteria, were associated in erotic devilry and sacrilegious rages with
Cantianille, reads for all the world like the procedure in the trials of
wizards of long ago, the histories of Gaufrédy and Madeleine Palud, of
Urbain Grandier and Madeleine Bavent, or the Jesuit Girard and La
Cadière, histories, by the way, in which much might be said about
hystero-epilepsy on one hand and about Diabolism on the other. At any
rate, Cantianille, after being sent away from the convent, was exorcised
by a certain priest of the diocese, abbé Thorey, who seems to have been
contaminated by his patient. Soon at Auxerre there were such scandalous
scenes, such frenzied outbursts of Diabolism, that the bishop had to
intervene. Cantianille was driven out of the country, abbé Thorey was
disciplined, and the affair went to Rome.
"The curious thing about it is that the bishop, terrified by what he had
seen, requested to be dismissed, and retired to Fontainebleau, where he
died, still in terror, two years later."
"My friends," said Carhaix, consulting his watch, "it is a quarter to
eight. I must be going up into the tower to sound the angelus. Don't
wait for me. Have your coffee. I shall rejoin you in ten minutes."
He put on his Greenland costume, lighted a lantern, and opened the door.
A stream of glacial air poured in. White molecules whirled in the
blackness.
"The wind is driving the snow in through the loopholes along the stair,"
said the woman. "I am always afraid that Louis will take cold in his
chest this kind of weather. Oh, well, Monsieur des Hermies, here is the
coffee. I appoint you to the task of serving it. At this hour of day my
poor old limbs won't hold me up any longer. I must go lie down."
"The fact is," sighed Des Hermies, when they had wished her good night,
"the fact is that mama Carhaix is rapidly getting old. I have vainly
tried to brace her up with tonics. They do no good. She has worn herself
out. She has climbed too many stairs in her life, poor woman!"
"All the same, it's very curious, what you have told me," said Durtal.
"To sum up, the most important thing about Satanism is the black mass."
"That and the witchcraft and incubacy and succubacy which I will tell
you about; or rather, I will get another more expert than I in these
matters to tell you about them. Sacrilegious mass, spells, and
succubacy. There you have the real quintessence of Satanism."
"And these hosts consecrated in blasphemous offices, what use is made of
them when they are not simply destroyed?"
"But I already told you. They are used to consummate infamous acts.
Listen," and Des Hermies took from the bell-ringers bookshelf the fifth
volume of the _Mystik_ of Görres. "Here is the flower of them all:
"'These priests, in their baseness, often go so far as to
celebrate the mass with great hosts which then they cut through
the middle and afterwards glue to a parchment, similarly cloven,
and use abominably to satisfy their passions.'"
"Holy sodomy, in other words?"
"Exactly."
At this moment the bell, set in motion in the tower, boomed out. The
chamber in which Durtal and Des Hermies were sitting trembled and a
droning filled the air. It seemed that waves of sound came out of the
walls, unrolling in a spiral from the very rock, and that one was
transported, in a dream, into the inside of one of these shells which,
when held up to the ear, simulate the roar of rolling billows. Des
Hermies, accustomed to the mighty resonance of the bells at short range,
thought only of the coffee, which he had put on the stove to keep hot.
Then the booming of the bell came more slowly. The humming departed from
the air. The window panes, the glass of the bookcase, the tumblers on
the table, ceased to rattle and gave off only a tenuous tinkling.
A step was heard on the stair. Carhaix entered, covered with snow.
"Cristi, boys, it blows!" He shook himself, threw his heavy outer
garments on a chair, and extinguished his lantern. "There were blinding
clouds of snow whirling in between the sounding-shutters. I can hardly
see. Dog's weather. The lady has gone to bed? Good. But you haven't
drunk your coffee?" he asked as he saw Durtal filling the glasses.
Carhaix went up to the stove and poked the fire, then dried his eyes,
which the bitter cold had filled with tears, and drank a great draught
of coffee.
"Now. That hits the spot. How far had you got with your lecture, Des
Hermies?"
"I finished the rapid expose of Satanism, but I haven't yet spoken of
the genuine monster, the only real master that exists at the present
time, that defrocked abbé--"
"Oh!" exclaimed Carhaix. "Take care. The mere name of that man brings
disaster."
"Bah! Canon Docre--to utter his ineffable name--can do nothing to us. I
confess I cannot understand why he should inspire any terror. But never
mind. I should like for Durtal, before we hunt up the canon, to see your
friend Gévingey, who seems to be best and most intimately acquainted
with him. A conversation with Gévingey would considerably amplify my
contributions to the study of Satanism, especially as regards venefices
and succubacy. Let's see. Would you mind if we invited him here to
dine?"
Carhaix scratched his head, then emptied the ashes of his pipe on his
thumbnail.
"Well, you see, the fact is, we have had a slight disagreement."
"What about?"
"Oh, nothing very serious. I interrupted his experiments here one day.
But pour yourself some liqueur, Monsieur Durtal, and you, Des Hermies,
why, you aren't drinking at all," and while, lighting their cigarettes,
both sipped a few drops of almost proof cognac, Carhaix resumed,
"Gévingey, who, though an astrologer, is a good Christian and an honest
man--whom, indeed, I should be glad to see again--wished to consult my
bells.
"That surprises you, but it's so. Bells formerly played quite an
important part in the forbidden science. The art of predicting the
future with their sounds is one of the least known and most disused
branches of the occult. Gévingey had dug up some documents, and wished
to verify them in the tower."
"Why, what did he do?"
"How do I know? He stood under the bell, at the risk of breaking his
bones--a man of his age on the scaffolding there! He was halfway into
the bell, the bell like a great hat, you see, coming clear down over his
hips. And he soliloquized aloud and listened to the repercussions of his
voice making the bronze vibrate.
"He spoke to me also of the interpretation of dreams about bells.
According to him, whoever, in his sleep, sees bells swinging, is menaced
by an accident; if the bell chimes, it is presage of slander; if it
falls, ataxia is certain; if it breaks, it is assurance of afflictions
and miseries. Finally he added, I believe, that if the night birds fly
around a bell by moonlight one may be sure that sacrilegious robbery
will be committed in the church, or that the curate's life is in danger.
"Be all that as it may, this business of touching the bells, getting up
into them--and you know they're consecrated--of attributing to them the
gift of prophecy, of involving them in the interpretation of dream--an
art formally forbidden in Leviticus--displeased me, and I demanded,
somewhat rudely, that he desist."
"But you did not quarrel?"
"No, and I confess I regret having been so hasty."
"Well then, I will arrange it. I shall go see him--agreed?" said Des
Hermies.
"By all means."
"With that we must run along and give you a chance to get to bed, seeing
that you have to be up at dawn."
"Oh, at half-past five for the six o'clock angelus, and then, if I want
to, I can go back to bed, for I don't have to ring again till a quarter
to eight, and then all I have to do is sound a couple of times for the
curate's mass. As you can see, I have a pretty easy thing of it."
"Mmmm!" exclaimed Durtal, "if I had to get up so early!"
"It's all a matter of habit. But before you go won't you have another
little drink? No? Really? Well, good night!"
He lighted his lantern, and in single file, shivering, they descended
the glacial, pitch-dark, winding stair.