“No.”
“Well, to refresh your soul I will tell you. This martyr, who was very young, was stretched out, his hands and feet bound, on a bed, then a superb specimen of femininity was brought in, who tried to force him. As he was burning and was about to sin, he bit off his tongue and spat it in the face of the woman, ‘and thus pain drove out temptation,’ says the good de Voragine.”
“My heroism would not carry me so far as that, I confess. But must you go so soon?”
“Yes, I have a pressing engagement.”
“What a queer age,” said Durtal, conducting him to the door. “It is just at the moment when positivism is at its zenith that mysticism rises again and the follies of the occult begin.”
“Oh, but it’s always been that way. The tail ends of all centuries are alike. They’re always periods of vacillation and uncertainty. When materialism is rotten-ripe magic takes root. This phenomenon reappears every hundred years. Not to go further back, look at the decline of the last century. Alongside of the rationalists and atheists you find Saint-Germain, Cagliostro, Saint-Martin, Gabalis, Cazotte, the Rosicrucian societies, the infernal circles, as now. With that, goodbye and good luck.”
“Yes,” said Durtal, closing the door, “but Cagliostro and his ilk had a certain audacity, and perhaps a little knowledge, while the mages of our time—what inept fakes!”
XIX
In a fiacre they went up the rue de Vaugirard. Mme. Chantelouve was as in a shell and spoke not a word. Durtal looked closely at her when, as they passed a street lamp, a shaft of light played over her veil a moment, then winked out. She seemed agitated and nervous beneath her reserve. He took her hand. She did not withdraw it. He could feel the chill of it through her glove, and her blonde hair tonight seemed disordered, dry, and not so fine as usual.
“Nearly there?”
But in a low voice full of anguish she said, “Do not speak.”
Bored by this taciturn, almost hostile tête-à-tête, he began to examine the route through the windows of the cab. The street stretched out interminable, already deserted, so badly paved that at every step the cab springs creaked. The lampposts were beginning to be further and further apart. The cab was approaching the ramparts.
“Singular itinerary,” he murmured, troubled by the woman’s cold, inscrutable reserve.
Abruptly the vehicle turned up a dark street, swung around, and stopped.
Hyacinthe got out. Waiting for the cabman to give him his change, Durtal inspected the lay of the land. They were in a sort of blind alley. Low houses, in which there was not a sign of life, bordered a lane that had no sidewalk. The pavement was like billows. Turning around, when the cab drove away, he found himself confronted by a long high wall above which dry leaves rustled in the shadows. A little door with a square grating in it was cut into the thick unlighted wall, which was seamed with fissures. Suddenly, further away, a ray of light shot out of a show window, and, doubtless attracted by the sound of the cab wheels, a man wearing the black apron of a wineshop keeper lounged through the shop door and spat on the threshold.
“This is the place,” said Mme. Chantelouve.
She rang. The grating opened. She raised her veil. A shaft of lantern light struck her full in the face, the door opened noiselessly, and they penetrated into a garden.
“Good evening, madame.”
“Good evening, Marie. In the chapel?”
“Yes. Does madame wish me to guide her?”
“No, thanks.”
The woman with the lantern scrutinized Durtal. He perceived, beneath a hood, wisps of grey hair falling in disorder over a wrinkled old face, but she did not give him time to examine her and returned to a tent beside the wall serving her as a lodge.
He followed Hyacinthe, who traversed the dark lanes, between rows of palms, to the entrance of a building. She opened the doors as if she were quite at home, and her heels clicked resolutely on the flagstones.
“Be careful,” she said, going through a vestibule. “There are three steps.”
They came out into a court and stopped before an old house. She rang. A little man advanced, hiding his features, and greeted her in an affected, singsong voice. She passed, saluting him, and Durtal brushed a flyblown face, the eyes liquid, gummy, the cheeks plastered with cosmetics, the lips painted.
“I have stumbled into a lair of sodomists.—You didn’t tell me that I was to be thrown into such company,” he said to Hyacinthe, overtaking her at the turning of a corridor lighted by a lamp.
“Did you expect to meet saints here?”
She shrugged her shoulders and opened a door. They were in a chapel with a low ceiling crossed by beams
