'Yes, I do not disguise it: woman is the main object, the great
appetite, of my soul. As you feed the victim for the slaughter, I love
to rear the votaries of my pleasure. I love to train, to ripen their
minds--to unfold the sweet blossom of their hidden passions, in order to
prepare the fruit to my taste. I loathe your ready-made and ripened
courtesans; it is in the soft and unconscious progress of innocence to
desire that I find the true charm of love; it is thus that I defy
satiety; and by contemplating the freshness of others, I sustain the
freshness of my own sensations. From the young hearts of my victims I
draw the ingredients of the caldron in which I re-youth myself. But
enough of this: to the subject before us. You know, then, that in
Neapolis some time since I encountered Ione and Apaecides, brother and
sister, the children of Athenians who had settled at Neapolis. The death
of their parents, who knew and esteemed me, constituted me their
guardian. I was not unmindful of the trust. The youth, docile and mild,
yielded readily to the impression I sought to stamp upon him. Next to
woman, I love the old recollections of my ancestral land; I love to keep
alive--to propagate on distant shores (which her colonies perchance yet
people) her dark and mystic creeds. It may be, that it pleases me to
delude mankind, while I thus serve the deities. To Apaecides I taught
the solemn faith of Isis. I unfolded to him something of those sublime
allegories which are couched beneath her worship. I excited in a soul
peculiarly alive to religious fervor that enthusiasm which imagination
begets on faith. I have placed him amongst you: he is one of you.'

'He is so,' said Calenus: 'but in thus stimulating his faith, you have
robbed him of wisdom. He is horror-struck that he is no longer duped:
our sage delusions, our speaking statues and secret staircases dismay
and revolt him; he pines; he wastes away; he mutters to himself; he