ages looked rapturously at
the infant Jesus, who stood beside the Virgin and held out his hands in
benediction.

Then there was a print of Breughel, engraved by Cock, "The wise and the
foolish virgins": a little panel, cut in the middle by a corkscrew cloud
which was flanked at each side by angels with their sleeves rolled up
and their cheeks puffed out, sounding the trumpet, while in the middle
of the cloud another angel, bizarre and sacerdotal, with his navel
indicated beneath his languorously flowing robe, unrolled a banderole on
which was written the verse of the Gospel, "_Ecce sponsus venit, exite
obviam ei_."

Beneath the cloud, at one side, sat the wise virgins, good Flemings,
with their lighted lamps, and sang canticles as they turned the spinning
wheel. At the other side were the foolish virgins with their empty
lamps. Four joyous gossips were holding hands and dancing in a ring on
the greensward, while the fifth played the bagpipe and beat time with
her foot. Above the cloud the five wise virgins, slender and ethereal
now, naked and charming, brandished flaming tapers and mounted toward a
Gothic church where Christ stood to welcome them; while on the other
side the foolish virgins, imperfectly draped, beat vainly on a closed
door with their dead torches.

The blessed naivete of the Primitives, the homely touches in the scenes
of earth and of heaven! Durtal loved this old engraving. He saw in it a
union of the art of an Ostade purified and that of a Thierry Bouts.

Waiting for his grate, in which the charcoal was crackling and peeling
and running like frying grease, to become red, he sat down in front of
his desk and ran over his notes.

"Let's see," he said to himself, rolling a cigarette, "we had come to
the time when that excellent Gilles de Rais begins the quest of the
'great work.' It is easy to figure what knowledge he possessed about the
method of transmuting metals into gold.

"Alchemy was already highly developed a century before he was born. The
writings of Albertus Magnus, Arnaud de Villeneuve, and Raymond Lully
were in the hands of the hermetics. The manuscripts of Nicolas Flamel
circulated, and there is no doubt that Gilles had acquired them, for he
was an avid collector of the rare. Let us add that at that epoch the
edict of Charles interdicting spagyric labours under pain of prison and
hanging, and the bull, _Spondent pariter quas non exhibent_, which Pope
John XXII fulminated against the