t kitchens called the four faculties could elaborate and
serve to the understanding, he had devoured, and had been satiated with
them before his hunger was appeased. Then he had penetrated further,
lower, beneath all that finished, material, limited knowledge; he had,
perhaps, risked his soul, and had seated himself in the cavern at
that mysterious table of the alchemists, of the astrologers, of the
hermetics, of which Averroes, Gillaume de Paris, and Nicolas Flamel hold
the end in the Middle Ages; and which extends in the East, by the
light of the seven-branched candlestick, to Solomon, Pythagoras, and
Zoroaster.

That is, at least, what was supposed, whether rightly or not. It
is certain that the archdeacon often visited the cemetery of the
Saints-Innocents, where, it is true, his father and mother had been
buried, with other victims of the plague of 1466; but that he appeared
far less devout before the cross of their grave than before the strange
figures with which the tomb of Nicolas Flamel and Claude Pernelle,
erected just beside it, was loaded.

It is certain that he had frequently been seen to pass along the Rue des
Lombards, and furtively enter a little house which formed the corner
of the Rue des Ecrivans and the Rue Marivault. It was the house which
Nicolas Flamel had built, where he had died about 1417, and which,
constantly deserted since that time, had already begun to fall in
ruins,--so greatly had the hermetics and the alchemists of all countries
wasted away the walls, merely by carving their names upon them. Some
neighbors even affirm that they had once seen, through an air-hole,
Archdeacon Claude excavating, turning over, digging up the earth in the
two cellars, whose supports had been daubed with numberless couplets and
hieroglyphics by Nicolas Flamel himself. It was supposed that Flamel had
buried the philosopher's stone in the cellar; and the alchemists, for
the space of two centuries, from Magistri to Father Pacifique, never
ceased to worry the soil until the house, so cruelly ransacked and
turned over, ended by falling into dust beneath their feet.

Again, it is certain that the archdeacon had been seized with a singular
passion for the symbolical door of Notre-Dame, that page of a conjuring
book written in stone, by Bishop Guillaume de Paris, who has, no doubt,
been damned for having affixed so infernal a frontispiece to the sacred
poem chanted by the rest of the edifice. Archdeacon Claude had t