emained there for several days, during
which La Constantin and Claude Perregaud, by an infamous use of their
professional knowledge, restored their clients to an outward appearance
of honour, and enabled them to maintain their reputation for virtue. The
first and second floors contained a dozen rooms in which these abominable
mysteries were practised. The large apartment, which served as waiting
and consultation room, was oddly furnished, being crowded with objects of
strange and unfamiliar form. It resembled at once the operating-room of
a surgeon, the laboratory of a chemist and alchemist, and the den of a
sorcerer. There, mixed up together in the greatest confusion, lay
instruments of all sorts, caldrons and retorts, as well as books
containing the most absurd ravings of the human mind. There were the
twenty folio volumes of Albertus Magnus; the works of his disciple,
Thomas de Cantopre, of Alchindus, of Averroes, of Avicenna, of
Alchabitius, of David de Plaine-Campy, called L'Edelphe, surgeon to Louis
XIII and author of the celebrated book The Morbific Hydra Exterminated by
the Chemical Hercules. Beside a bronze head, such as the monk Roger
Bacon possessed, which answered all the questions that were addressed to
it and foretold the future by means of a magic mirror and the combination
of the rules of perspective, lay an eggshell, the same which had been
used by Caret, as d'Aubigne tells us, when making men out of germs,
mandrakes, and crimson silk, over a slow fire. In the presses, which had
sliding-doors fastening with secret springs, stood Jars filled with
noxious drugs, the power of which was but too efficacious; in prominent
positions, facing each other, hung two portraits, one representing
Hierophilos, a Greek physician, and the other Agnodice his pupil, the
first Athenian midwife.

For several years already La Constantin and Claude Perregaud had carried
on their criminal practices without interference. A number of persons
were of course in the secret, but their interests kept them silent, and
the two accomplices had at last persuaded themselves that they were
perfectly safe. One evening, however, Perregaud came home, his face
distorted by terror and trembling in every limb. He had been warned
while out that the suspicions of the authorities had been aroused in
regard to him and La Constantin. It seemed that some little time ago,
the Vicars-General had sent a deputation to the president of the chief
c