ing and consultation room, was oddly
furnished, being crowded with objects of strange and unfamiliar form. It
resembled at once the operating-room of a surgeon, the laboratory of
a chemist and alchemist, and the den of a sorcerer. There, mixed up
together in the greatest confusion, lay instruments of all sorts,
caldrons and retorts, as well as books containing the most absurd
ravings of the human mind. There were the twenty folio volumes of
Albertus Magnus; the works of his disciple, Thomas de Cantopre, of
Alchindus, of Averroes, of Avicenna, of Alchabitius, of David de
Plaine-Campy, called L'Edelphe, surgeon to Louis XIII and author of
the celebrated book The Morbific Hydra Exterminated by the Chemical
Hercules. Beside a bronze head, such as the monk Roger Bacon possessed,
which answered all the questions that were addressed to it and foretold
the future by means of a magic mirror and the combination of the rules
of perspective, lay an eggshell, the same which had been used by Caret,
as d'Aubigne tells us, when making men out of germs, mandrakes, and
crimson silk, over a slow fire. In the presses, which had sliding-doors
fastening with secret springs, stood Jars filled with noxious drugs, the
power of which was but too efficacious; in prominent positions, facing
each other, hung two portraits, one representing Hierophilos, a Greek
physician, and the other Agnodice his pupil, the first Athenian midwife.

For several years already La Constantin and Claude Perregaud had carried
on their criminal practices without interference. A number of persons
were of course in the secret, but their interests kept them silent,
and the two accomplices had at last persuaded themselves that they were
perfectly safe. One evening, however, Perregaud came home, his face
distorted by terror and trembling in every limb. He had been warned
while out that the suspicions of the authorities had been aroused in
regard to him and La Constantin. It seemed that some little time ago,
the Vicars-General had sent a deputation to the president of the chief
court of justice, having heard from their priests that in one year alone
six hundred women had avowed in the confessional that they had taken
drugs to prevent their having children. This had been sufficient to
arouse the vigilance of the police, who had set a watch on Perregaud's
house, with the result that that very night a raid was to be made on it.
The two criminals took hasty counsel together, but, a