acts; it moves amid bullets, and cannon, and men; it crosses Europe at the will of a power I obey and yet despise.  My soul has no consciousness of these acts; it is fixed, immovable, plunged in one idea, rapt in that idea, the Search for the Alkahest,—­for that principle by which seeds that are absolutely alike, growing in the same environments, produce, some a white, others a yellow flower.  The same phenomenon is seen in silkworms fed from the same leaves, and apparently constituted exactly alike,—­one produces yellow silk, another white; and if we come to man himself, we find that children often resemble neither father nor mother.  The logical deduction from this fact surely involves the explanation of all the phenomena of nature.

“’Ah, what can be more in harmony with our ideas of God than to believe that he created all things by the simplest method?  The Pythagorean worship of one, from which come all other numbers, and which represented Primal Matter; that of the number two, the first aggregation and the type of all the rest; that of the number three, which throughout all time has symbolized God,—­that is to say, Matter, Force, and Product,—­are they not an echo, lingering along the ages, of some confused knowledge of the Absolute?  Stahl, Becker, Paracelsus, Agrippa, all the great Searchers into occult causes took the Great Triad for their watchword,—­in other words, the Ternary.  Ignorant men who despise alchemy, that transcendent chemistry, are not aware that our work is only carrying onward the passionate researches of those great men.  Had I found the Absolute, the Unconditioned, I meant to have grappled with Motion.  Ah! while I am swallowing gunpowder and leading men uselessly to their death, my former master is piling discovery upon discovery! he is soaring towards the Absolute, while I —­I shall die like a dog in the trenches!’

“When this poor grand man recovered his composure, he said, in a touching tone of brotherhood, ’If I see cause for a great experiment I will bequeath it to you before I die.’—­My Pepita,” cried Balthazar, taking his wife’s hands, “tears of anguish rolled down his hollow cheeks, as he cast into my soul the fiery arguments that Lavoisier had timidly recognized without daring to follow them out—­”

“Oh!” cried Madame Claes, unable to refrain from interrupting her husband, “that man, passing one night under our roof, was able to deprive us of your love, to destroy with a phrase, a word, the happiness of a family!  Oh, my dear Balthazar, did he make the sign of the cross? did you examine him?  The Tempter alone could have had that flaming eye which sent forth the fire of Prometheus.  Yes, none but the devil could have torn you from me.  From that day you have been neither husband, nor father, nor master of your family.”

“What!” exclaimed Balthazar, springing to his feet and casting a piercing glance at his wife, “do you blame your husband for rising above the level of other men that he may lay at your feet the divine purple of his glory, as a paltry offering in exchange for the treasures of your heart!  Ah, my Pepita,” he cried, “you do not know what I have done.  In these three years I have made giant strides—­”