rom whence the _lointain bruissement du
Paris nocturne_ might be heard by the pensive traveller if he were not
too intent on diabolising. Now, he has found out that Lucifer was _chez
lui_ everywhere. _Je vise Satan et ses dogmes._ All his psychic
faculties have concentrated into a transcendental apparatus for scenting
devildom, and he mournfully comes forward to tell us, with a variation
of Fludd's utterance; _Diabolus, in quam, diabolus ubique repertus est,
et omnia diabolus et diabolus._ "Let it suffice to say that the
demonologists have invented nothing and have exaggerated nothing." To
the spiritualists Lucifer is John King and Allan Kardec; to the
Gnostics, he is the Gnosis, Simon Magus, Helen Ennoia, and anything that
comes handy from the Nile valley in the fourth century; to the
Martinists, he is the _philosophe inconnu_; to the Albigenses, if there
are Parisian Albigenses, he is whatever Albigenses invoke, if they
invoke anything; to Madame X., he is Mary Stuart; to his own adepts,
within sound of the _lointain bruissement_, he is a _jeune homme blond
aux yeux bleus_, whom I understand to have worn a dalmatic, and to have
been curiously indebted to the author of _Aut Diabolus aut Nihil_; for
the Theosophists, he is that "illustrious demoniac," Madame
Blawatsky--his innate delicacy leads him to the permutation of the
Typhon V.; and then Freemasonry--it goes without saying that the little
horn of Lucifer has displaced all other horns in all the grades and
lodges, that the fraternity is his throne and his footstool, and the
city of the great king.

If we button-hole Jean Kostka, and ask him to tell us confidentially and
upon honour what it is that has changed his views, making him discover
the leer of Baal-Zeboub where he once saw the smile of the spiritual
Eos, he turns Trappist at once, and goes into retreat with M. Huysman;
there is not a syllable of information in all his _beau volume_ as to
any intellectual process through which he passed on the way, and I
suspect that his conversion partook of the nature of a "penetration," to
speak his own language, and was not an intellectual operation, but a
sudden _volte face_. Jean Kostka has changed his _pinces-nez_, and that
is the whole secret:--

"The reason why I cannot tell,
But now I hold it comes from hell."

Here is the proof positive; he has nothing in the shape of an
accusation; he gets his Lucifer-interpretation out of everything with
which he ha