And it is I! It is I! So many absurdities in my name!... But our young women have fallen asleep, their hair mingled with the flowers they were arranging. Let them be. Take away these lilacs which would give them headaches. O divine creatures, you know all, knowing love, and you have no need of our vain philosophies. He rose, and, walking round the table, kissed all three upon the cheek. Then he sat down again beside me, and spoke: HE I shall not tell you what matter is; I do not know. Matter is that which is, that which has always been, that which will always be. With Epicurus, I conceived it as an infinity of atoms, or of points, meeting at hazard, and forming groups here and there; it appears to me now more like a tissue, but that comes to the same thing, since there must always be space between the continuous elements of this tissue. Otherwise we should have a mass, immobile, and consequently inert. One cannot suppress space, whose reality, however, it is impossible to conceive; for if space is empty it is nothing, and yet without this nothingness nothing could exist. In admitting matter in the form of a tissue, we suppose an infinity of lines cutting each other in all ways; but a line is made up of points. Let us return then to points; that is clearer, though not much so. Your chemistry believed that it reached the limits of analysis, in discovering the molecules that it counts and weighs. But it is evident that a ponderable point can be cut into two points equally ponderable, and so on to infinity, and so on without limit of space or of time. There would be, then, two infinites: one above us, since every number can be increased; the other below us, since every number can be diminished. However, since space must be considered as an absolute void, as a perfect nothingness, as nothing, it is possible that each of these two infinites would abut sharply on this void, on this nothing. The world is perhaps limited. This tissue is, perhaps, a sphere isolated in the midst of the nothingness. As one does not well see how something can come out of the nothingness, or how something can become nothingness, we shall conclude that the eternity of matter coincides with the eternity of this nothingness. In this way we shall have being and not-being. But, as not-being is perfectly inconceivable though necessary to the existence of being, we shall leave it aside; what else should we do with it? I am aware that one of your learned men has lately been able to speak with a certain logic of the final annulment of matter; I do not think that this idea has a really perceptible meaning, either for men or for gods. What is, is. Disintegration, moreover, does not signify destruction, but change. The face of things has changed and will change again, but the very essence of things is as eternal as chance. This universe is only one of the innumerable tricks of chance, one of the fortuitous moments in the eternal movement ... You find this tedious? I