is childhood; everything that
had influenced his life; a marriage broken off, why, with whom, the
exact description of the woman he had loved; and, finally, the place he
came from, his lawsuit, etc.

Gazonal at first thought it was a hoax prepared by his companions; but
the absolute impossibility of such a conspiracy appeared to him almost
as soon as the idea itself, and he sat speechless before that truly
infernal power, the incarnation of which borrowed from humanity a form
which the imagination of painters and poets has throughout all ages
regarded as the most awful of created things,--namely, a toothless,
hideous, wheezing hag, with cold lips, flattened nose, and whitish eyes.
The pupils of those eyes had brightened, through them rushed a ray,--was
it from the depths of the future or from hell?

Gazonal asked, interrupting the old creature, of what use the toad and
the hen were to her.

"They predict the future. The consulter himself throws grain upon the
cards; Bilouche comes and pecks it. Astaroth crawls over the cards
to get the food the client holds for him, and those two wonderful
intelligences are never mistaken. Will you see them at work?--you will
then know your future. The cost is a hundred francs."

Gazonal, horrified by the gaze of Astaroth, rushed into the antechamber,
after bowing to the terrible old woman. He was moist from head to foot,
as if under the incubation of some evil spirit.

"Let us get away!" he said to the two artists. "Did you ever consult
that sorceress?"

"I never do anything important without getting Astaroth's opinion," said
Leon, "and I am always the better for it."

"I'm expecting the virtuous fortune which Bilouche has promised me,"
said Bixiou.

"I've a fever," cried Gazonal. "If I believed what you say I should have
to believe in sorcery, in some supernatural power."

"It may be only natural," said Bixiou. "One-third of all the lorettes,
one-fourth of all the statesmen, and one-half of all artists consult
Madame Fontaine; and I know a minister to whom she is an Egeria."

"Did she tell you about your future?" asked Leon.

"No; I had enough of her about my past. But," added Gazonal, struck by
a sudden thought, "if she can, by the help of those dreadful
collaborators, predict the future, how came she to lose in the lottery?"

"Ah! you put your finger on one of the greatest mysteries of occult
science," replied Leon. "The moment that the species of inward mirror on
whi