“It’s a two-sided age,” said Gevingey, pensive.  “People believe nothing, yet gobble everything.  Every day a new science is invented.  Nobody reads that admirable Paracelsus who rediscovered all that had ever been found and created everything that had not.  Say now to your congress of scientists that, according to this great master, life is a drop of the essence of the stars, that each of our organs corresponds to a planet and depends upon it; that we are, in consequence, a foreshortening of the divine sphere.  Tell them—­and this, experience attests—­that every man born under the sign of Saturn is melancholy and pituitous, taciturn and solitary, poor and vain; that that sluggish star predisposes to superstition and fraud, directs epilepsies and varices, hemorrhoids and leprosies; that it is, alas! the great purveyor to hospital and prison—­and the scientists will shrug their shoulders and laugh at you.  The glorified pedants and homiletic asses!”

“Paracelsus,” said Des Hermies, “was one of the most extraordinary practitioners of occult medicine.  He knew the now forgotten mysteries of the blood, the still unknown medical effects of light.  Professing—­as did also the cabalists, for that matter—­that the human being is composed of three parts, a material body, a soul, and a perispirit called also an astral body, he attended this last especially and produced reactions on the carnal envelope by procedures which are either incomprehensible or fallen into disuse.  He cared for wounds by treating not the tissues, but the blood which came out of them.  However, we are assured that he healed certain ailments.”

“Thanks to his profound knowledge of astrology,” said Gevingey.

“But if the study of the sidereal influence is so important,” said Durtal, “why don’t you take pupils?”

“I can’t get them.  Where will you unearth people willing to study twenty years without glory or profit?  Because, to be able to establish a horoscope one must be an astronomer of the first order, know mathematics from top to bottom, and one must have put in long hours tussling with the obscure Latin of the old masters.  Besides, you must have the vocation and the faith, and they are lost.”

“Just the way it is with bell ringing,” said Carhaix.

“No, you see, messieurs,” Gevingey went on, “the day when the grand sciences of the Middle Ages fell foul of the systematic and hostile indifference of an impious people was the death-day of the soul in France.  All we can do now is fold our arms and listen to the wild vagaries of society, which by turns shrieks with farcical joy and bitter grief.”

“We must not despair.  A better time is coming,” said Mme. Carhaix in a conciliating tone, and before she retired she shook hands with all her guests.

“The people,” said Des Hermies, pouring the water into the coffee-pot, “instead of being ameliorated with time, grow, from century to century, more avaricious, abject, and stupid.  Remember the Siege, the Commune; the unreasonable infatuations, the tumultuous hatreds, all the dementia of a deteriorated, malnourished people in arms.  They certainly cannot compare with the naif and tender-hearted plebes of the Middle Ages.  Tell us, Durtal, how the people acted when Gilles de Rais was conducted to the stake.”