that we ought to seize the two men and
search, incontinently, their accursed workshop. But before proceeding
to do so, we wanted to see what was going to happen. After about
fifteen minutes the door opened, and Cosmo Ruggiero, my mother's
counsellor,--the bottomless pit which holds the secrets of the court, he
from whom all women ask help against their husbands and lovers, and all
the men ask help against their unfaithful wives and mistresses, he who
traffics on the future as on the past, receiving pay with both
hands, who sells horoscopes and is supposed to know all things,--that
semi-devil came in, saying to the old man, 'Good-day to you, brother.'
With him he brought a hideous old woman,--toothless, humpbacked,
twisted, bent, like a Chinese image, only worse. She was wrinkled as a
withered apple; her skin was saffron-colored; her chin bit her nose;
her mouth was a mere line scarcely visible; her eyes were like the black
spots on a dice; her forehead emitted bitterness; her hair escaped in
straggling gray locks from a dirty coif; she walked with a crutch; she
smelt of heresy and witchcraft. The sight of her actually frightened us,
Tavannes and me! We didn't think her a natural woman. God never made a
woman so fearful as that. She sat down on a stool near the pretty snake
with whom Tavannes was in love. The two brothers paid no attention
to the old woman nor to the young woman, who together made a horrible
couple,--on the one side life in death, on the other death in life--"

"Ah! my sweet poet!" cried Marie, kissing the king.

"'Good-day, Cosmo,' replied the old alchemist. And they both looked into
the furnace. 'What strength has the moon to-day?' asked the elder. 'But,
_caro Lorenzo_,' replied my mother's astrologer, 'the September tides
are not yet over; we can learn nothing while that disorder lasts.' 'What
says the East to-night?' 'It discloses in the air a creative force which
returns to earth all that earth takes from it. The conclusion is that
all things here below are the product of a slow transformation, but that
all diversities are the forms of one and the same substance.' 'That is
what my predecessor thought,' replied Lorenzo. 'This morning Bernard
Palissy told me that metals were the result of compression, and that
fire, which divides all, also unites all; fire has the power to compress
as well as to separate. That man has genius.' Though I was placed where
it was impossible for them to see me, Cosmo said