rate of four hundred leagues an hour, a velocity that the
fastest trains cannot attain. You are astonished? We rush along
without knowing it. Our planet does not only turn on itself, but at
the same time it turns round the sun at the rate of nearly a hundred
thousand miles an hour. Every second we cover thirty thousand miles.
Men have never invented a cannon ball that could fly so quickly. You
move through space fixed to a projectile which whirls with dizzy
speed, and, deceived by your smallness, you think you are living
immovable in a dead cathedral. And this velocity is as nothing
compared with others. The sun round which we turn, flies and flies
through space, carrying on by its attraction the earth and the other
planets. It goes through immensity, dragging us along, travelling
towards the unknown, without ever striking other bodies, finding
always sufficient space to move in with a rapidity which makes one
giddy; and this has gone on for thousands and millions of centuries
without either it or the earth who follows it in its flight ever
passing twice over the same spot."

They all listened to Gabriel open-mouthed with astonishment, and their
bright eyes seemed dazed and bewildered.

"It is enough to drive one mad," murmured the bell-ringer. "What then
is man, Gabriel?"

"Nothing; even as this earth, which seems so large, and that we have
peopled with religions, kingdoms and revelations from God, is nothing.
Dreams of ants! even less! This same sun which seems so enormous
compared to our globe is nothing more than an atom in immensity. What
you call stars are other suns like ours, surrounded by planets like
our earth, but which are invisible on account of their small size. How
many are they? Man brings his optical instruments to perfection and
is able to pierce further into the fields of heaven, discovering ever
more and more. Those which are scarcely visible in the infinite appear
much nearer when a new telescope is invented, and beyond them in
the depths of space others and again others appear, and so on
everlastingly. They are unaccountable. Some are worlds inhabited like
ours; others were so, and revolve solitary in space, waiting for a
fresh evolution of life; many are still forming; and yet all these
worlds are no more than corpuscles of the luminous mist of the
infinite. Space is peopled by fires that have burnt for millions,
trillions and quadrillions of centuries, throwing out heat and light.
The milky