“While laboriously gnawing my way through a redoubtable sole with sauce au gratin, I examined the habitues seated all around me and I found them singularly altered since my last visit.  They had become bony or bloated; their eyes were either hollow, with violet rings around them, or puffy, with crimson pouches beneath; the fat people had become yellow and the thin ones were turning green.

“More deadly than the forgotten venefices of the days of the Avignon papacy, the terrible preparations served in this place were slowly poisoning its customers.

“It was interested, as you may believe.  I made myself the subject of a course of toxicological research, and, studying my food as it went down, I identified the frightful ingredients masking the mixtures of tannin and powdered carbon with which the fish was embalmed; and I penetrated the disguise of the marinated meats, painted with sauces the colour of sewage; and I diagnosed the wine as being coloured with fuscin, perfumed with furfurol, and enforced with molasses and plaster.

“I have promised myself to return every month to register the slow but sure progress of these people toward the tomb.”

“Oh!” cried Mme. Carhaix.

“And you will claim,” said Durtal, “that you aren’t Satanic?”

“See, Carhaix, he’s at it already.  He won’t even give us time to get our breath, but must be dogging us about Satanism.  It’s true I promised him I’d try and get you to tell us something about it tonight.  Yes,” continued Des Hermies, in response to Carhaix’s look of astonishment, “yesterday, Durtal, who is engaged, as you know, in writing a history of Gilles de Rais, declared that he possessed all the information there was about Diabolism in the Middle Ages.  I asked him if he had any material on the Satanism of the present day.  He asked me what I was talking about, and wouldn’t believe that these practices are being carried on right now.”

“But they are,” replied Carhaix, becoming grave.  “It is only too true.”

“Before we go any further, there is one question I’d like to put to Des Hermies,” said Durtal.  “Can you, honestly, without joking, without letting that saturnine smile play around the corner of your mouth, tell me, in perfectly good faith, whether you do or do not believe in Catholicism?”

“He!” exclaimed the bell-ringer.  “Why, he’s worse than an unbeliever, he’s a heresiarch.”

“The fast is, if I were certain of anything, I would be inclined toward Manicheism,” said Des Hermies.  “It’s one of the oldest and it is the simplest of religions, and it best explains the abominable mess everything is in at the present time.

“The Principle of Good and the Principle of Evil, the God of Light and the God of Darkness, two rivals, are fighting for our souls.  That’s at least clear.  Right now it is evident that the Evil God has the upper hand and is reigning over the world as master.  Now—­and on this point, Carhaix, who is distressed by these theories, can’t reprehend me—­I am for the under dog.  That’s a generous and perfectly proper idea.”