This apart, Jean Kostka, was evidently for many years familiar with the centres and workings of all the cross lights of esoteric thought which meet and interlace in the night of French common thought. He has dwelt among Gnostics, Martinists, Modern Albigenses, and Spiritualists; he appears to have been identified with all, and though he does not accuse himself of the capital offence of conscious Satanism, he has been quite well acquainted with Satanism, and, next best to seeing the devil one's self, he has known many who have. In those days, he tells us, that Lucifer could be visited _chez lui_ in an earthly tabernacle, situated in an unfrequented street, from whence the _lointain bruissement du Paris nocturne_ might be heard by the pensive traveller if he were not too intent on diabolising. Now, he has found out that Lucifer was _chez lui_ everywhere. _Je vise Satan et ses dogmes._ All his psychic faculties have concentrated into a transcendental apparatus for scenting devildom, and he mournfully comes forward to tell us, with a variation of Fludd's utterance; _Diabolus, in quam, diabolus ubique repertus est, et omnia diabolus et diabolus._ "Let it suffice to say that the demonologists have invented nothing and have exaggerated nothing." To the spiritualists Lucifer is John King and Allan Kardec; to the Gnostics, he is the Gnosis, Simon Magus, Helen Ennoia, and anything that comes handy from the Nile valley in the fourth century; to the Martinists, he is the _philosophe inconnu_; to the Albigenses, if there are Parisian Albigenses, he is whatever Albigenses invoke, if they invoke anything; to Madame X., he is Mary Stuart; to his own adepts, within sound of the _lointain bruissement_, he is a _jeune homme blond aux yeux bleus_, whom I understand to have worn a dalmatic, and to have been curiously indebted to the author of _Aut Diabolus aut Nihil_; for the Theosophists, he is that "illustrious demoniac," Madame Blawatsky--his innate delicacy leads him to the permutation of the Typhon V.; and then Freemasonry--it goes without saying that the little horn of Lucifer has displaced all other horns in all the grades and lodges, that the fraternity is his throne and his footstool, and the city of the great king. If we button-hole Jean Kostka, and ask him to tell us confidentially and upon honour what it is that has changed his views, making him discover the leer of Baal-Zeboub where he once saw the smile of the spiritual Eos, he turns Trappist at once, and goes into retreat with M. Huysman; there is not a syllable of information in all his _beau volume_ as to any intellectual process through which he passed on the way, and I suspect that his conversion partook of the nature of a "penetration," to speak his own language, and was not an intellectual operation, but a sudden _volte face_. Jean Kostka has changed his _pinces-nez_, and that is the whole secret:-- "The reason why I cannot tell, But now I hold it comes from hell."