on.

Jehan accordingly recognized his brother; but the door had been
opened so softly, that nothing warned Dom Claude of his presence. The
inquisitive scholar took advantage of this circumstance to examine the
cell for a few moments at his leisure. A large furnace, which he had
not at first observed, stood to the left of the arm-chair, beneath the
window. The ray of light which penetrated through this aperture made
its way through a spider's circular web, which tastefully inscribed its
delicate rose in the arch of the window, and in the centre of which the
insect architect hung motionless, like the hub of this wheel of lace.
Upon the furnace were accumulated in disorder, all sorts of vases,
earthenware bottles, glass retorts, and mattresses of charcoal. Jehan
observed, with a sigh, that there was no frying-pan. "How cold the
kitchen utensils are!" he said to himself.

In fact, there was no fire in the furnace, and it seemed as though none
had been lighted for a long time. A glass mask, which Jehan noticed
among the utensils of alchemy, and which served no doubt, to protect the
archdeacon's face when he was working over some substance to be dreaded,
lay in one corner covered with dust and apparently forgotten. Beside it
lay a pair of bellows no less dusty, the upper side of which bore this
inscription incrusted in copper letters: SPIRA SPERA.

Other inscriptions were written, in accordance with the fashion of the
hermetics, in great numbers on the walls; some traced with ink, others
engraved with a metal point. There were, moreover, Gothic letters,
Hebrew letters, Greek letters, and Roman letters, pell-mell; the
inscriptions overflowed at haphazard, on top of each other, the more
recent effacing the more ancient, and all entangled with each other,
like the branches in a thicket, like pikes in an affray. It was, in
fact, a strangely confused mingling of all human philosophies, all
reveries, all human wisdom. Here and there one shone out from among the
rest like a banner among lance heads. Generally, it was a brief Greek
or Roman device, such as the Middle Ages knew so well how to
formulate.--_Unde? Inde?--Homo homini monstrurn-Ast'ra, castra, nomen,
numen.--Meya Bibklov, ueya xaxov.--Sapere aude. Fiat ubi vult_--etc.;
sometimes a word devoid of all apparent sense, _Avayxoqpayia_, which
possibly contained a bitter allusion to the regime of the cloister;
sometimes a simple maxim of clerical discipline formulated in a regu