At that time, Balzac was very preoccupied with the occult sciences, palmistry, and card reading; he had been told of an oracle even more astonishing than Mademoiselle Lenormand, and he persuaded me, as well as Madame E. de Girardin and Méry, to go and consult her with him. The prophetess lived in Auteuil, I no longer know in which street; that matters little to my story, because the address that was given was false. We came upon an honorable middle class family on holiday: the husband, the wife, and an old mother in whom Balzac, sure of his facts, persisted in finding a mystical air. The good woman, not flattered to have been taken for a sorceress, became angry; the husband took us for tricksters or crooks; the young woman laughed loudly, and the servant hastened prudently to lock up the silver. We had no choice but to withdraw after our blunder; but Balzac maintained that we were in the right place, and having climbed back into the carriage, muttered insults at the old lady: "Demon, harpy, magician, vampire, worm, monster, lemur, ghoul, snake charmer, creature," and all of the bizarre terms that a familiarity with the litanies of Rabelais could suggest to him. I said: "If she is a sorceress, she hides her game well." "Of cards," added Madame de Girardin with a quickness of mind that never failed her. We tried some further explorations, always fruitlessly, and Delphine asserted that Balzac had imagined this resource of Quinola in order to be driven by carriage to Auteuil, where he had business, and to procure some pleasant traveling companions. It is necessary to believe, however, that Balzac alone found that Madame Fontaine that we were all seeking together, because, in Les Comédiens Sans le Savoir, he depicted her between her hen Bilouche and her toad Astaroth with a fantastic and frightening truthfulness, if those two words can go together. Did he consult her seriously? Did he go to see her as a simple observer? Many passages in La Comédie Humaine seem to suggest that Balzac had a kind of faith in the occult sciences, about which the official sciences have still not said their last word. Around this time, Balzac began to show a taste for old furniture, chests, vases; the least piece of worm-eaten wood that he bought on the Rue de Lappe always had an illustrious provenance, and he created detailed genealogies for his lesser knickknacks. He hid them here and there, always because of those fantastical creditors that I was starting to doubt. I even amused myself by spreading the rumor that Balzac was a millionaire, that he was buying old stockings from dealers in caterpillars to hide onces, quadruples, génovines, crusades, colonnates, double louis, in the manner of Père Grandet; I said everywhere that he had three cisterns, like Aboul-Casem, filled to the brim with garnets, dinars and rials. "Théo will get my throat cut with his jokes!" said Balzac, annoyed and charmed.