come here to confessional,' but she
finally admitted that her father had violated her before she attained
the age of puberty.

"That, of course, is against reason and contrary to all accepted ideas,
but there is no getting around the fact that this priest cures patients
whom we physicians have given up for lost."

"Such as the only astrologer Paris now can boast, the astounding
Gevingey, who would have been dead without his aid. I wonder how
Gevingey came to cast the Empress Eugenie's horoscope."

"Oh, I told you. Under the Empire the Tuileries was a hotbed of magic.
Home, the American, was revered as the equal of a god. In addition to
spiritualistic seances he evoked demons at court. One evocation had
fatal consequences. A certain marquis, whose wife had died, implored
Home to let him see her again. Home took him to a room, put him in bed,
and left him. What ensued? What dreadful phantom rose from the tomb? Was
the story of Ligeia re-enacted? At any rate, the marquis was found dead
at the foot of the bed. This story has recently been reported by Le
Figaro from unimpeachable documents.

"You see it won't do to play with the world spirits of Evil. I used to
know a rich bachelor who had a mania for the occult sciences. He was
president of a theosophic society and he even wrote a little book on the
esoteric doctrine, in the Isis series. Well, he could not, like the
Peladan and Papus tribe, be content with knowing nothing, so he went to
Scotland, where Diabolism is rampant. There he got in touch with the man
who, if you stake him, will initiate you into the Satanic arcana. My
friend made the experiment. Did he see him whom Bulwer Lytton in
_Zanoni_ calls 'the dweller of the threshold'? I don't know, but certain
it is that he fainted from horror and returned to France exhausted, half
dead."

"Evidently all is not rosy in that line of work," said Durtal. "But it
is only spirits of Evil that can be evoked?"

"Do you suppose that the Angels, who, of earth, obey only the saints,
would ever consent to take orders from the first comer?"

"But there must be an intermediate order of angels, who are neither
celestial nor infernal, who, for instance, commit the well-known
asininities in the spiritist seances."

"A priest told me one day that the neuter larvae inhabit an invisible,
neutral territory, something like a little island, which is beseiged on
all sides by the good and evil spirits. The larvae cannot long hold out
a