“What is curious,” said Durtal, interrupting his writing to light a cigarette, “is that—­”

A gentle ring.  Mme. Chantelouve entered.

She declared that she could stay only two minutes.  She had a carriage waiting below.  “Tonight,” she said, “I will call for you at nine.  First write me a letter in practically these terms,” and she handed him a paper.  He unfolded it and read this declaration: 

“I certify that all that I have said and written about the Black Mass, about the priest who celebrated it, about the place where I claimed to have witnessed it, about the persons alleged to have been there, is pure invention.  I affirm that I imagined all these incidents, that, in consequence, all that I have narrated is false.”

“Docre’s?” he asked, studying the handwriting, minute, pointed, twisted, aggressive.

“Yes, and he wants this declaration, not dated, to be made in the form of a letter from you to a person consulting you on the subject.”

“Your canon distrusts me.”

“Of course.  You write books.”

“It doesn’t please me infinitely to sign that,” murmured Durtal.  “What if I refuse?”

“You will not go to the Black Mass.”

His curiosity overcame his reluctance.  He wrote and signed the letter and Mme. Chantelouve put it in her card-case.

“And in what street is the ceremony to take place?”

“In the rue Olivier de Serres.”

“Where is that?”

“Near the rue de Vaugirard, away up.”

“Is that where Docre lives?”

“No, we are going to a private house which belongs to a lady he knows.  Now, if you’ll be so good, put off your cross-examination to some other time, because I am in an awful hurry.  At nine o’clock.  Don’t forget.  Be all ready.”

He had hardly time to kiss her and she was gone.

“Well,” said he, “I already had data on incubacy and poisoning by spells.  There remained only the Black Mass, to make me thoroughly acquainted with Satanism as it is practised in our day.  And I am to see it!  I’ll be damned if I thought there were such undercurrents in Paris.  And how circumstances hang together and lead to each other!  I had to occupy myself with Gilles de Rais and the diabolism of the Middle Ages to get contemporary diabolism revealed to me.”  And he thought of Docre again.  “What a sharper that priest is!  Among the occultists who maunder today in the universal decomposition of ideas he is the only one who interests me.

“The others, the mages, the theosophists, the cabalists, the spiritists, the hermetics, the Rosicrucians, remind me, when they are not mere thieves, of children playing and scuffling in a cellar.  And if one descend lower yet, into the hole-in-the-wall places of the pythonesses, clairvoyants, and mediums, what does one find except agencies of prostitution and gambling?  All these pretended peddlers of the future are extremely nasty; that’s the only thing in the occult of which one can be sure.”