ate plains, with extinct
craters, under a black sky.

"Come towards those stars with a softer radiance, so that we may gaze
upon the angels who hold them with the ends of their arms, like
torches!"

The Devil carries him into the midst of the stars.

"They attract one another at the same time that they repel one another.
The action of each has an effect on the others, and helps to produce
their movements--and all this without the medium of an auxiliary, by the
force of a law, by the virtue simply of order."

_Antony_--"Yes ... yes! my intelligence grasps it! It is a joy greater
than the sweetness of affection! I pant with stupefaction before the
immensity of God!"

_The Devil_--"Like the firmament, which rises in proportion as you
ascend, He will become greater according as your imagination mounts
higher; and you will feel your joy increase in proportion to the
unfolding of the universe, in this enlargement of the Infinite."

_Antony_--"Ah! higher! ever higher!"

The stars multiply and shed around their scintillations. The Milky Way
at the zenith spreads out like an immense belt, with gaps here and
there; in these clefts, amid its brightness, dark tracts reveal
themselves. There are showers of stars, trains of golden dust, luminous
vapours which float and then dissolve.

Sometimes a comet sweeps by suddenly; then the tranquillity of the
countless lights is renewed.

Antony, with open arms, leans on the Devil's two horns, thus occupying
the entire space covered by his wings. He recalls with disdain the
ignorance of former days, the limitation of his ideas. Here, then, close
beside him, were those luminous globes which he used to gaze at from
below. He traces the crossing of their paths, the complexity of their
directions. He sees them coming from afar, and, suspended like stones in
a sling, describing their orbits and pushing forward their parabolas.

He perceives, with a single glance, the Southern Cross and the Great
Bear, the Lynx and the Centaur, the nebulae of the Gold-fish, the six
suns in the constellation of Orion, Jupiter with his four satellites,
and the triple ring of the monstrous Saturn! all the planets, all the
stars which men should, in future days, discover! He fills his eyes with
their light; he overloads his mind with a calculation of their
distances;--then he lets his head fall once more.

"What is the object of all this?"

_The Devil_--"There is no object!

"How could God have had an