Well, I think it's quite enough to live
once. I'd prefer nothingness, a hole in the ground, to all those
metamorphoses. It's more consoling to me. As for the evocation of the
dead, the mere thought that the butcher on the corner can force the soul
of Hugo, Balzac, Baudelaire, to converse with him, would put me beside
myself, if I believed it. Ah, no. Materialism, abject as it is, is less
vile than that."

"Spiritism," said Carhaix, "is only a new name for the ancient
necromancy condemned and cursed by the Church."

Gevingey looked at his rings, then emptied his glass.

"In any case," he returned, "you will admit that these theories can be
upheld, especially that of the elementals, which, setting Satanism
aside, seems the most veridic, and certainly is the most clear. Space is
peopled by microbes. Is it more surprising that space should also be
crammed with spirits and larvae? Water and vinegar are alive with
animalcules. The microscope shows them to us. Now why should not the
air, inaccessible to the sight and to the instruments of man, swarm,
like the other elements, with beings more or less corporeal, embryos
more or less mature?"

"That is probably why cats suddenly look upward and gaze curiously into
space at something that is passing and that we can't see," said the
bell-ringer's wife.

"No, thanks," said Gevingey to Des Hermies, who was offering him another
helping of egg-and-dandelion salad.

"My friends," said the bell-ringer, "you forget only one doctrine, that
of the Church, which attributes all these inexplicable phenomena to
Satan. Catholicism has known them for a long time. It did not need to
wait for the first manifestations of the spirits--which were produced, I
believe, in 1847, in the United States, through the Fox family--before
decreeing that spirit rapping came from the Devil. You will find in
Saint Augustine the proof, for he had to send a priest to put an end to
noises and overturning of objects and furniture, in the diocese of
Hippo, analogous to those which Spiritism points out. At the time of
Theodoric also, Saint Caesaraeus ridded a house of lemurs haunting it. You
see, there are only the City of God and the City of the Devil. Now,
since God is above these cheap manipulations, the occultists and
spiritists satanize more or less, whether they wish to or not."

"Nevertheless, Spiritism has accomplished one important thing. It has
violated the threshold of the unknown, broken the doors of