f brightness, intelligence, and
science--blind fly! senseless, learned man! thou hast not perceived
that subtle spider's web, stretched by destiny betwixt the light
and thee--thou hast flung thyself headlong into it, and now thou art
struggling with head broken and mangled wings between the iron antennae
of fate! Master Jacques! Master Jacques! let the spider work its will!"

"I assure you," said Charmolue, who was gazing at him without
comprehending him, "that I will not touch it. But release my arm,
master, for pity's sake! You have a hand like a pair of pincers."

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 Daemonum_.' 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