The archdeacon did not hear him. "Oh, madman!" he went on, without removing his gaze from the window. "And even couldst thou have broken through that formidable web, with thy gnat's wings, thou believest that thou couldst have reached the light? Alas! that pane of glass which is further on, that transparent obstacle, that wall of crystal, harder than brass, which separates all philosophies from the truth, how wouldst thou have overcome it? Oh, vanity of science! how many wise men come flying from afar, to dash their heads against thee! How many systems vainly fling themselves buzzing against that eternal pane!"
He became silent. These last ideas, which had gradually led him back from himself to science, appeared to have calmed him. Jacques Charmolue recalled him wholly to a sense of reality by addressing to him this question: "Come, now, master, when will you come to aid me in making gold? I am impatient to succeed."
The archdeacon shook his head, with a bitter smile. "Master Jacques read Michel Psellus' 'Dialogus de Energia et Operatione Dæmonum.' What we are doing is not wholly innocent."
"Speak lower, master! I have my suspicions of it," said Jacques Charmolue. "But one must practise a bit of hermetic science when one is only procurator of the king in the ecclesiastical court, at thirty crowns tournois a year. Only speak low."
At that moment the sound of jaws in the act of mastication, which proceeded from beneath the furnace, struck Charmolue's uneasy ear.
"What's that?" he inquired.
It was the scholar, who, ill at ease, and greatly bored in his hiding-place, had succeeded in discovering there a stale crust and a triangle of mouldy cheese, and had set to devouring the whole without ceremony, by way of consolation and breakfast. As he was very hungry, he made a great deal of noise, and he accented each mouthful strongly, which startled and alarmed the procurator.
"'Tis a cat of mine," said the archdeacon, quickly, "who is regaling herself under there with a mouse."
