side the foolish virgins, imperfectly draped, beat vainly on a closed
door with their dead torches.

The blessed naïveté of the Primitives, the homely touches in the scenes
of earth and of heaven! Durtal loved this old engraving. He saw in it a
union of the art of an Ostade purified and that of a Thierry Bouts.

Waiting for his grate, in which the charcoal was crackling and peeling
and running like frying grease, to become red, he sat down in front of
his desk and ran over his notes.

"Let's see," he said to himself, rolling a cigarette, "we had come to
the time when that excellent Gilles de Rais begins the quest of the
'great work.' It is easy to figure what knowledge he possessed about the
method of transmuting metals into gold.

"Alchemy was already highly developed a century before he was born. The
writings of Albertus Magnus, Arnaud de Villeneuve, and Raymond Lully
were in the hands of the hermetics. The manuscripts of Nicolas Flamel
circulated, and there is no doubt that Gilles had acquired them, for he
was an avid collector of the rare. Let us add that at that epoch the
edict of Charles interdicting spagyric labours under pain of prison and
hanging, and the bull, _Spondent pariter quas non exhibent_, which Pope
John XXII fulminated against the alchemists, were still in vigour. These
treatises were, then, forbidden, and in consequence desirable. It is
certain that Gilles had long studied them, but from that to
understanding them is a far cry.

"For they were written in an impossible jargon of allegories, twisted
and obscure metaphors, incoherent symbols, ambiguous parables, enigmas,