in
curiously. It was almost as rigid as a sheet of metal.

The old merchant set the lamp back again upon the column, giving
the other a look as he did so. "He has given up the notion of dying
already," the glance said with phlegmatic irony.

"Is it a jest, or is it an enigma?" asked the younger man.

The other shook his head and said soberly:

"I don't know how to answer you. I have offered this talisman with its
terrible powers to men with more energy in them than you seem to me to
have; but though they laughed at the questionable power it might exert
over their futures, not one of them was ready to venture to conclude the
fateful contract proposed by an unknown force. I am of their opinion, I
have doubted and refrained, and----"

"Have you never even tried its power?" interrupted the young stranger.

"Tried it!" exclaimed the old man. "Suppose that you were on the column
in the Place Vendome, would you try flinging yourself into space? Is it
possible to stay the course of life? Has a man ever been known to die
by halves? Before you came here, you had made up your mind to kill
yourself, but all at once a mystery fills your mind, and you think no
more about death. You child! Does not any one day of your life afford
mysteries more absorbing? Listen to me. I saw the licentious days of
Regency. I was like you, then, in poverty; I have begged my bread; but
for all that, I am now a centenarian with a couple of years to spare,
and a millionaire to boot. Misery was the making of me, ignorance has
made me learned. I will tell you in a few words the great secret of
human life. By two instinctive processes man exhausts the springs of
life within him. Two verbs cover all the forms which these two causes of
death may take--To Will and To have your Will. Between these two limits
of human activity the wise have discovered an intermediate formula, to
which I owe my good fortune and long life. To Will consumes us, and To
have our Will destroys us, but To Know steeps our feeble organisms
in perpetual calm. In me Thought has destroyed Will, so that Power is
relegated to the ordinary functions of my economy. In a word, it is not
in the heart which can be broken, or in the senses that become deadened,
but it is in the brain that cannot waste away and survives everything
else, that I have set my life. Moderation has kept mind and body
unruffled. Yet, I have seen the whole world. I have learned all
languages, lived after every manner.