"You know, madam," he said and took mother's sleeve, "that St Mary the Egyptian, going on pilgrimage to the sepulchre of our Lord, was stopped by a deep flowing river, and not possessing a single farthing to pay for the pa.s.sage on the ferry-boat she offered to the boatmen her own body as a payment. What do you say to that, my good mistress?"

First of all my mother asked if the story was quite true. After she had been a.s.sured that the matter had been printed in a book and painted on a stained window in the Church of La Jussienne she believed it.

"I think," she said, "that one has to be as holy as she was to do the like without committing a sin. I must say that I should not like to do it."

"As far as I am concerned," said the priest, "I approve of the conduct of that saint, quite in accord with the most subtle doctors. It is a lesson for honest women stubborn in too much pride of their haughty virtue. Thinking well over it there is some sensuality in prizing too highly the flesh and guarding excessively what one ought to despise.

There are some matrons to be met with who believe they have a treasure and who visibly exaggerate the interest G.o.d and the angels may have in them. They believe themselves to be a kind of natural Holy Sacrament. St Mary the Egyptian was a better judge. Pretty and divinely shaped as she was, she considered that it would be all too proud of her flesh to stop in the course of a holy pilgrimage for a paltry indifferent reason which is no more than a piece of mortification and far from being a precious jewel. She humbled herself, madam, and entered by using so admirable a humility the road of penitence, where she accomplished marvellous works."

"Your reverence," said my mother, "I do not understand you. You are too learned for me."

"That grand saint." said Friar Ange, "is painted in a state of nature in the chapel of my convent, and by the grace of G.o.d all her body is covered with long and thick hair. Reproductions of this picture have been printed, and I'll bring you a fully blessed one, my dear madam."

Tenderly touched, my mother pa.s.sed the soup-tureen to him, behind the back of my teacher. And the holy friar, seated on the cinder board, silently soaked his bread in the savoury liquid.

"Now is the moment," said my father, "to uncork one of those bottles which I keep in reserve for the great feasts, which are Christmas, Twelfth Night, and St Laurence's Day. Nothing is more agreeable than to drink a good wine quietly at home secure of unwelcome intruders."

Hardly had these words been uttered when the door was opened and a tall man in black entered the shop in a squall of snow and wind exclaiming:

"A Salamander! A Salamander!"

And without taking notice of anyone he bent over the grate, rummaging in the cinders with the end of his walking stick, very much to the detriment of Friar Ange, who coughed fit to give up the ghost, swallowing the ashes and coal-dust thrown into his soup plate. And the man in black still continued to rummage in the fire, shouting, "A Salamander! I see a Salamander!" while the stirred-up flames made the shadow of his bodily form tremble on the ceiling like a large bird of prey.

My father was surprised and rather annoyed by the manners of the visitor. But he knew how to restrain himself. And so he rose, his napkin under his arm, and went to the fireplace, bending to the hearth, both his fists on his thighs.

When he had sufficiently considered the disordered fireplace, and Friar Ange covered with ashes, he said:

"Your lordship will excuse me. I cannot see anything but this paltry monk, and no Salamander.

"Besides," my father went on, "I have but little regret over it. I have it from hearsay that it is an ugly beast, hairy and horned, with big claws."

"What an error!" replied the man in black. "Salamanders resemble women, or, to speak precisely, nymphs, and they are perfectly beautiful! But I feel myself rather a simpleton to ask you if you're able to see this one. One has to be a philosopher to see a Salamander, and I do not think philosophers could be found in this kitchen."

"You may be mistaken, sir," said the Abbe Coignard. "I am a Doctor of Divinity and Master of Arts. I have also studied the Greek and Latin moralists, whose maxims have strengthened my soul in the vicissitudes of my life, and I have particularly applied Boethius as an antidote for the evils of existence. And here near me is Jacobus Tournebroche, my disciple, who knows the sentences of Publius Syrus by heart."

The stranger turned his yellow eyes on the priest, eyes strangely marked over a nose like the beak of an eagle, and excused himself with more courtesy than his fierce mien led one to expect, for not having at once recognised a person of merit, and further he said:

"It is very likely that this Salamander has come for you or your pupil. I saw it very distinctly in pa.s.sing along the street before this cookshop. She would appear better if the fire were fiercer; for this reason it is necessary to stir the fire vigorously when you believe A Salamander to be in it."

At the first movement the stranger made to rummage again in the fire, Friar Ange anxiously covered the soup-tureen with a flap of his frock and shut his eyes.

"Sir," said the Salamander-man, "allow your young pupil to approach the fireplace to say if he does not see something resembling a woman hovering over the flames."

At this very moment the smoke rising under the slab of the chimney bent itself with a peculiar gracefulness, and formed rotundities quite likely to be taken for well-arched loins by a rather strangely strained imagination. Therefore I did not tell an absolute lie by saying that, maybe, I saw something.

No sooner had I given this reply than the stranger, raising his huge arm, gave me a straight hander on the shoulder so powerful that I thought my collar-bone was broken. But at once he said to me, with a very sweet voice and a benevolent look:

"My child, I have been obliged to give you so strong an impression that you may never forget that you have seen a Salamander, which is a sign that your destiny is to become a learned man, perhaps a magician. Your face also made me surmise favourably of your intelligence."

"Sir," said my mother, "he learns anything he wants to know and he'll be a priest if it pleases our Lord."

M. Jerome Coignard added that I had profited in a certain way by his lessons, and my father asked the stranger if his lordship would not be disposed to eat a morsel.

"I am not in want of anything," said the stranger, "and it's easy for me to go without any food for a year or longer because of a certain elixir the composition of which is known only to the philosophical. This faculty is not confined to myself alone, it is the common property of all wise men, and it is known that the ill.u.s.trious Cardan went without food during several years without being incommoded by it. On the contrary his mind became singularly vivacious. But still I'll eat what it pleases you to offer me, simply to please you."

And he took a seat at our little table without any ceremony. At once Friar Ange also noiselessly pushed his stool between mine and that of my teacher and sat on it to receive his portion of the partridge pie my mother was dishing up.

The philosopher having thrown his cape over the back of his seat, we could see that he wore diamond b.u.t.tons on his coat. He remained thoughtful. The shadow of his nose fell on his mouth and his hollow cheeks went deep into his jaws. His gloomy humour took possession of the whole company. No other noise was audible but the one made by the little friar munching his pie.

Suddenly the philosopher said:

"The more I think it over, the more I am convinced that yonder Salamander came for this lad." And he pointed his knife at me.

"Sir," I replied, "if the Salamanders are really as you say, this one honours me very much, and I am truly obliged to her. But, to say the truth, I have rather guessed than seen her, and this first encounter has only awakened my curiosity without giving me full satisfaction."

Unable to speak at his ease, my good teacher was suffocating. Suddenly, breaking out very loud, he said to the philosopher:

"Sir, I am fifty-one years old, a master of arts and a doctor of divinity. I have read all the Greek and Latin authors, who have not been annihilated either by time's injury or by man's malice, and I have never seen a Salamander, wherefrom I conclude that no such thing exists."

"Excuse me," said Friar Ange, half suffocated by partridge pie and half by dismay; "excuse me! Unhappily some Salamanders do exist and a learned Jesuit father, whose name I have forgotten, has discoursed on their apparition. I myself have seen, at a place called St Claude, at a cottager's, a Salamander in a fireplace close to a kettle. She had a cat's head, a toad's body and the tail of a fish. I threw a handful of holy water on the beast, and it at once disappeared in the air, with a frightful noise like sudden frying and I was enveloped in acrid fumes, which very nearly burnt my eyes out. And what I say is so true that for at least a whole week my beard smelt of burning, which proves better than anything else the maliciousness of the beast."

"You want to make game of us, little friar," said the abbe. "Your toad with a cat's head is no more real than the Nymph of that gentleman, and it is quite a disgusting invention."

The philosopher began to laugh, and said Friar Ange had not seen the wise man's Salamander. When the Nymphs of the fire meet with a Capuchin they turn their back on him.

"Oh! Oh!" said my father, bursting out laughing, "the back of a Nymph is still too good for a Capuchin."

And being in a good humour, he sent a mighty slice of the pie to the little friar.

My mother placed the roast in the middle of the table, and took advantage of it to ask if the Salamanders are good Christians, of which she had her doubts, as she had never heard that the inhabitants of fire praised the Lord.

"Madam," replied my teacher, "several theologians of the Society of Jesus have recognised the existence of a people of incubus and succubus who are not properly demons, because they do not let themselves be routed by an aspersion of holy water and who do not belong to the Church Triumphant; glorified spirits would never have attempted, as has been the case at Perouse, to seduce the wife of a baker. But if you wish for my opinion, they are rather the dirty imaginations of a sneak than the views of a doctor.

"You must hate and bewail that sons of the Church, born in light, could conceive of the world and of G.o.d a less sublime idea than that formed by a Plato or a Cicero in the night of ignorance and of paganism. G.o.d is less absent, I dare say, from the Dream of Scipio than from those black tractates of demonology the authors of which call themselves Christians and Catholics."

"Sir," replied the priest, "I found a very old MS. of Cicero spoke with effluence and facility, but he was but a commonplace intellect, and not very learned in holy sciences. Have you ever heard of Hermes Trismegistus and of the Emerald Table?"

"Sir," replied the priest, "I found a very old MS. of the Emerald Table in the library of the Bishop of Seez, and I should have marvelled over it one day or another, but for the chamber-maid of the bailiff's lady who went to Paris to make her fortune and who made me ride in the coach with her. There was no witchcraft used, Sir Philospher, and I only succ.u.mbed to natural charms:

'Non facit hoc verbis; facie tenerisque lacertis Devovet et flavis nostra puella comis.'"

"That's a new proof," said the philosopher, "women are great enemies of science, and the wise man ought to keep himself aloof from them."

"In legitimate marriage also?" inquired my father.

"Especially in legitimate marriage," replied the philosopher.

"Alas!" my father continued to question, "what remains to your poor wise men when they feel disposed for a little fun?"