ho directed the Paris Observatory, where I
was working. At four o'clock in the afternoon my illustrious chief used
to depart, and I would then steal into his room and sit down before
Urania and dream of lovelier worlds than ours, hidden in the infinite
spaces of the starry sky. Sometimes my friend and companion in studies,
Georges Spero, would come and sit beside me; and, inspired by the
immortal beauty of Urania, we would let our young and ardent
imaginations play over the glories and wonders of the heavens.

"You will be too late for Jupiter," said Le Verrier, entering
unexpectedly one evening, and catching me in an attitude of adoration
before Urania. "I am afraid you are more of a poet than an astronomer."

The great man of science himself certainly did not love beauty as much
as he loved wisdom, for the next day he sold the lovely image of Urania
in order to buy an old Chinese astronomical clock. I was almost
heartbroken when I entered his room and found that Urania had
disappeared. With her had gone the vivifying power of imagination which
had transmuted the abstruse calculations on which I was engaged into
glimpses of heavenly visions of infinite life. With what wild joy then
did I see, when I returned home, Urania shining in all her loveliness on
my own mantelpiece. Knowing my love for the beautiful figure of the
muse, Georges Spero had bought it back from the watchmaker to whom Le
Verrier had sent it, and placed it in my room as a gift.

It was an extraordinary mark of friendship, for Georges loved Urania
even more passionately than I did. To him she was the personification of
everything in life that lifted man above the level of the brute.

Possessing a nobler and finer intellect than mine, he had thrown himself
into the study of the problems of the soul with a fury of passion and a
concentration of thought that almost killed him. Are our souls immortal,
or do they perish with our bodies? This was the question that tormented
him to madness. One night I found him sitting in his room in the Place
du Pantheon with a glass of poison in his hand.

"This is the quickest road to the knowledge I want," he said, with a
smile. "I shall soon know if the soul is immortal."

He had been dissecting a skull; and by his side was a microscope with
which he had been studying the grey matter of the brain. Convinced at
last of the uncertainty of the positive sciences, he had fallen into
violent despair. But Urania was at han