e little time.

CHAPTER LXXI

But to return to M. le Duc d'Orleans.

His curiosity, joined to a false idea of firmness and courage, had early
led him to try and raise the devil and make him speak. He left nothing
untried, even the wildest reading, to persuade himself there was no God;
and yet believed meanwhile in the devil, and hoped to see him and
converse with him! This inconsistency is hard to understand, and yet is
extremely common. He worked with all sorts of obscure people; and above
all with Mirepoix, sublieutenant of the Black Musketeers, to find out
Satan. They passed whole nights in the quarries of Vanvres and of
Vaugirard uttering invocations. M. le Duc d'Orleans, however, admitted
to me that he had never succeeded in hearing or seeing anything, and at
last had given up this folly.

At first it was only to please Madame d'Argenton, but afterwards from
curiosity, that he tried to see the present and the future in a glass of
water; so he said, and he was no liar. To be false and to be a liar are
not one and the same thing, though they closely resemble each other, and
if he told a lie it was only when hard pressed upon some promise or some
business, and in spite of himself, so as to escape from a dilemma.

Although we often spoke upon religion, to which I tried to lead him so
long as I had hope of success, I never could unravel the system he had
formed for himself, and I ended by becoming persuaded that he wavered
unceasingly without forming any religion at all.

His passionate desire, like that of his companions in morals, was this,
that it would turn out that there is no God; but he had too much
enlightenment to be an atheist; who is a particular kind of fool much
more rare than is thought. This enlightenment importuned him; he tried
to extinguish it and could not. A mortal soul would have been to him a
resource; but he could not convince himself of its existence. A God and
an immortal soul, threw him into sad straits, and yet he could not blind
himself to the truth of both the one and the other. I can say then this,
I know of what religion he was not; nothing more. I am sure, however,
that he was very ill at ease upon this point, and that if a dangerous
illness had overtaken him, and he had had the time, he would have thrown
himself into the hands of all the priests and all the Capuchins of the
town. His great foible was to pride himself upon his impiety and to wish
to surpass in that