"And Euphrasia!" cried the clerk, as he struck a bargain with the
devil that inhabited the house-painter.

The pact concluded, the frantic clerk went to find the shawl, and
mounted Madame Euphrasia's staircase; and as (literally) the devil was
in him, he did not come down for twelve days, drowning the thought of
hell and of his privileges in twelve days of love and riot and
forgetfulness, for which he had bartered away all his hopes of a
paradise to come.

And in this way the secret of the vast power discovered and acquired
by the Irishman, the offspring of Maturin's brain, was lost to
mankind; and the various Orientalists, Mystics, and Archaeologists who
take an interest in these matters were unable to hand down to
posterity the proper method of invoking the Devil, for the following
sufficient reasons:

On the thirteenth day after these frenzied nuptials the wretched clerk
lay on a pallet bed in a garret in his master's house in the Rue
Saint-Honore. Shame, the stupid goddess who dares not behold herself,
had taken possession of the young man. He had fallen ill; he would
nurse himself; misjudged the quantity of a remedy devised by the skill
of a practitioner well known on the walls of Paris, and succumbed to
the effects of an overdose of mercury. His corpse was as black as a
mole's back. A devil had left unmistakable traces of its passage
there; could it have been Ashtaroth?



"The estimable youth to whom you refer has been carried away to the