(literally) the devil was
in him, he did not come down for twelve days, drowning the thought
of hell and of his privileges in twelve days of love and riot and
forgetfulness, for which he had bartered away all his hopes of a
paradise to come.

And in this way the secret of the vast power discovered and acquired by
the Irishman, the offspring of Maturin's brain, was lost to mankind;
and the various Orientalists, Mystics, and Archaeologists who take an
interest in these matters were unable to hand down to posterity the
proper method of invoking the Devil, for the following sufficient
reasons:

On the thirteenth day after these frenzied nuptials the wretched
clerk lay on a pallet bed in a garret in his master's house in the Rue
Saint-Honore. Shame, the stupid goddess who dares not behold herself,
had taken possession of the young man. He had fallen ill; he would nurse
himself; misjudged the quantity of a remedy devised by the skill of
a practitioner well known on the walls of Paris, and succumbed to the
effects of an overdose of mercury. His corpse was as black as a mole's
back. A devil had left unmistakable traces of its passage there; could
it have been Ashtaroth?

"The estimable youth to whom you refer has been carried away to the
planet Mercury," said the head clerk to a German demonologist who came
to investigate the matter at first hand.

"I am quite prepared to believe it," answered the Teuton.

"Oh!"

"Yes, sir," returned the other. "The opinion you advance coincides with
the very words of Jacob Boehme. In the forty-eighth proposition of _The
Threefold Life of Man_ he says that 'if God hath brought all things
to pass with a LET THERE BE, the FIAT is the secret matrix which
comprehends and apprehends the nature which is formed by the spirit born
of Mercury and of God.'"

"What do you say, sir?"

The German delivered his quotation afresh.

"We do not know it," said the clerks.

"_Fiat_?..." said a clerk. "_Fiat lux_!"

"You can verify the citation for yourselves," said the German. "You will
find the passage in the _Treatise of the Threefold Life of Man_, page
75; the edition was published by M. Migneret in 1809. It was translated
into French by a philosopher who had a great admiration for the famous
shoemaker."

"Oh! he was a shoemaker, was he?" said the head clerk.

"In Prussia," said the German.

"Did he work for the King of Prussia?" inquired a Boeotian of a second
clerk.

"He must have v