“Look here, Hyacinthe darling, explain yourself,” he said, squeezing her hands, an expression of joy on his face.

“If I have made your mouth water so as not to have a grouchy face in front of my eyes, I have succeeded remarkably.”

He kept still, wondering whether she was making fun of him or whether she really was ready to tell him what he wanted to know.

“Listen,” she said.  “I hold firmly by my decision of the other night.  I will not permit you to become acquainted with Canon Docre.  But at a settled time I can arrange, without your forming any relations with him, to have you be present at the ceremony you most desire to know about.”

“The Black Mass?”

“Yes.  Within a week Docre will have left Paris.  If once, in my company, you see him, you will never see him afterward.  Keep your evenings free all this week.  When the time comes I will notify you.  But you may thank me, dear, because to be useful to you I am disobeying the commands of my confessor, whom I dare not see now, so I am damning myself.”

He kissed her, then, “Seriously, that man is really a monster?”

“I fear so.  In any case I would not wish anybody the misfortune of having him for an enemy.”

“I should say not, if he poisons people by magic, as he seems to have done Gevingey.”

“And he probably has.  I should not like to be in the astrologer’s shoes.”

“You believe in Docre’s potency, then.  Tell me, how does he operate, with the blood of mice, with broths, or with oil?”

“So you know about that!  He does employ these substances.  In fact, he is one of the very few persons who know how to manage them without poisoning themselves.  It’s as dangerous as working with explosives.  Frequently, though, when attacking defenceless persons, he uses simpler recipes.  He distils extracts of poison and adds sulphuric acid to fester the wound, then he dips in this compound the point of a lancet with which he has his victim pricked by a flying spirit or a larva.  It is ordinary, well-known magic, that of Rosicrucians and tyros.”

Durtal burst out laughing.  “But, my dear, to hear you, one would think death could be sent to a distance like a letter.”

“Well, isn’t cholera transmitted by letters?  Ask the sanitary corps.  Don’t they disinfect all mail in the time of epidemics?”

“I don’t contradict that, but the case is not the same.”

“It is too, because it is the question of transmission, invisibility, distance, which astonishes you.”

“What astonishes me more than that is to hear of the Rosicrucians actively satanizing.  I confess that I had never considered them as anything more than harmless suckers and funereal fakes.”

“But all societies are composed of suckers and the wily leaders who exploit them.  That’s the case of the Rosicrucians.  Yes, their leaders privately attempt crime.  One does not need to be erudite or intelligent to practise the ritual of spells.  At any rate, and I affirm this, there is among them a former man of letters whom I know.  He lives with a married woman, and they pass the time, he and she, trying to kill the husband by sorcery.”