eautiful when you
saw the print it had made on the tell-tale powder, uncle. He appeared to
me last year in this very room. You don't believe it? Well, it is true,
nevertheless."

Then turning towards the Spirit he said:

"What say you, Arcade? The Abbe Patouille, who is a great theologian and
a good priest, does not believe that you are an angel; and Uncle Gaetan,
who doesn't know his catechism and hasn't a scrap of religion in him,
doesn't think so either. They deny you, the pair of them; the one
because he has faith, the other because he hasn't. After that you may be
sure that your history, if ever it comes to be narrated, will scarcely
appear credible. Moreover, the man that took it into his head to tell
your story would not be a man of taste, and would not come in for much
approval. For your story is not a pretty one. I love you, but I sit in
judgment upon you, too. Since you fell into atheism, you have become an
abominable scoundrel. A bad angel, a bad friend, a traitor, and a
homicide, for I suppose it was to bring about my death that you sent
that black spaniel between my legs on the duelling-ground."

The angel shrugged his shoulders and, addressing Gaetan, said:

"Alas! Monsieur, I am not surprised at finding little credit in your
eyes. I have been told that you have fallen out with the Judaeo-Christian
heaven, which is where I came from."

"Monsieur," answered Gaetan, "my faith in Jehovah is not sufficiently
strong to enable me to believe in his angels."

"Monsieur, he whom you call Jehovah is really a coarse and ignorant
demiurge, and his name is Ialdabaoth."

"In that case, Monsieur, I am perfectly ready to believe in him. He is a
narrow-minded ignoramus, is he? Then belief in his existence offers me
no further difficulty. How is he getting on?"

"Badly! We are going to lay him low next month."

"Don't make too sure of that, Monsieur. You remind me of my
brother-in-law, Cuissart, who has been expecting to hear of the fall of
the Republic for the past thirty years."

"You see, Arcade," exclaimed Maurice, "Uncle Gaetan thinks as I do. He
knows you won't succeed."

"And, pray, Monsieur Gaetan, what makes you think I shall not succeed?"

"Your Ialdabaoth is still very powerful in this world, if he isn't in
the other. In days gone by he used to be upheld by his priests, by those
who believed in him. Now he is supported by those who do not believe in
him, by the philosophers. A pedant of a fellow cal