"I thank you for having brought singers and music! A banquet, young and
beautiful women, with dark locks, all the pleasures of life. Let them
remain. I am about to be born again."

"The delirium is at its height," said Don Juan to himself.

"I have discovered a means of resuscitation. There, look in the drawer of
the table--you open it by pressing a hidden spring near the griffin."

"I have it, father."

"Good! Now take out a little flask of rock crystal."

"Here it is."

"I have spent twenty years in----"

At this point the old man felt his end approaching, and collected all his
energy to say:

"As soon as I have drawn my last breath rub me with this water and I shall
come to life again."

"There is very little of it," replied the young man.

Bartholomeo was no longer able to speak, but he could still hear and see.
At these words he turned his head toward Don Juan with a violent wrench.
His neck remained twisted like that of a marble statue doomed by the
sculptor's whim to look forever sideways, his staring eyes assumed a
hideous fixity. He was dead, dead in the act of losing his only, his last
illusion. In seeking a shelter in his son's heart he had found a tomb more
hollow than those which men dig for their dead. His hair, too, had risen
with horror and his tense gaze seemed still to speak. It was a father
rising in wrath from his sepulchre to demand vengeance of God.

"There, the good man is done for!" exclaimed Don Juan.

Intent upon taking the magic crystal to the light of the lamp, as a
drinker examines his bottle at the end of a repast, he had not seen his
father's eye pale. The cowering dog looked alternately at his dead master
and at the elixir, as Don Juan regarded by turns his father and the phial.
The lamp threw out fitful waves of light. The silence was profound, the
viol was mute. Belvidero thought he saw his father move, and he trembled.
Frightened by the tense expression of the accusing eyes, he closed them,
just as he would have pushed down a window-blind on an autumn night. He
stood motionless, lost in a world of thought.

Suddenly a sharp creak, like that of a rusty spring, broke the silence.
Don Juan, in his surprise, almost dropped the flask. A perspiration,
colder than the steel of a dagger, oozed out from his pores. A cock of
painted wood came forth from a clock and crowed three times. It was one of
those ingenious inventions by which the savants of that time were awakened
at th