placed the two vases formed by his hand, Adam and Eve. They did not
live there alone, between the animals and plants. The spirits of the
air, created by the demiurges of the fire, were flowing over and
looking at them with a curiosity mixed with sympathy and pity. It
was exactly as Jehovah had foreseen. Let us hasten to say, to his
praise, he had relied on the genii of the fire, to whom we may now
give their true names of Elves and Salamanders, to ameliorate and
perfect his clay figures. In his prudence he may have said to
himself: 'My Adam and my Eve, opaque and cemented in clay, are in
want of air and light. I have failed to give them wings. But united
to Elves and Salamanders, the creations of a demiurge more powerful
and more subtle than myself, they will give birth to children,
equally originated by light and clay, and who in their turn will
have children still more luminous than themselves, till in the end
their issue will be equal in beauty to the sons and daughters of air
and fire.'

"It must be said he had neglected nothing to attract the eyes of
Sylphs and Salamanders in forming Adam and Eve. He had modelled the
woman in form of an amphora, with a harmony of curved lines quite
sufficient to make him recognised as the prince of geometers, and he
succeeded in amending the coarseness of the material by the
magnificent charm of the form. For modelling Adam he made use of a
less caressing, but more energetic, hand, forming his body with such
order, and in such perfect proportions, that, applied later by the
Greeks to their architecture, those same ordinances and measures
made the beauty of the temples.

"You see, my son, that Jehovah applied his best means to render his
creatures worthy of the aerial kisses he expected for them. I shall