the magic word which Zechiele pronounced when he struck his
nail."

"What nonsense!" thought Jehan.

"Let us see, let us try!" resumed the archdeacon briskly. "Were I to
succeed, I should behold the blue spark flash from the head of the nail.
Emen-Hetan! Emen-Hetan! That's not it. Sigeani! Sigeani! May this nail
open the tomb to any one who bears the name of Phoebus! A curse upon it!
Always and eternally the same idea!"

And he flung away the hammer in a rage. Then he sank down so deeply on
the arm-chair and the table, that Jehan lost him from view behind the
great pile of manuscripts. For the space of several minutes, all that he
saw was his fist convulsively clenched on a book. Suddenly, Dom Claude
sprang up, seized a compass and engraved in silence upon the wall in
capital letters, this Greek word

_ANArKH_.

"My brother is mad," said Jehan to himself; "it would have been far more
simple to write _Fatum_, every one is not obliged to know Greek."

The archdeacon returned and seated himself in his armchair, and placed
his head on both his hands, as a sick man does, whose head is heavy and
burning.

The student watched his brother with surprise. He did not know, he who
wore his heart on his sleeve, he who observed only the good old law
of Nature in the world, he who allowed his passions to follow their
inclinations, and in whom the lake of great emotions was always dry, so
freely did he let it off each day by fresh drains,--he did not know with
what fury the sea of human passions ferments and boils when all egress
is denied to it, how it accumulates, how it swells, how it overflows,
how it hollows out the heart; how it breaks in inward sobs, and dull
convulsions, until it has rent its dikes and burst its bed. The austere
and glacial envelope of Claude Frollo, that cold surface of steep and
inaccessible virtue, had always deceived Jehan. The merry scholar had
never dreamed that there was boiling lava, furious and profound, beneath
the snowy brow of AEtna.

We do not know whether he suddenly became conscious of these things;
but, giddy as he was, he understood that he had seen what he ought not
to have seen, that he had just surprised the soul of his elder brother
in one of its most secret altitudes, and that Claude must not be allowed
to know it. Seeing that the archdeacon had fallen back into his former
immobility, he withdrew his head very softly, and made some noise with
his feet outside the door, l