“The transmigration of souls was taught in India,” said Adolphe; “the cradle of the genus human, then in Egypt, then in Greece. They chanted its mysteries in the name of Orpheus. Pythagoras, who continued the teaching, did not admit with the philosophers on the banks of the Ganges that the soul traveled over the cycle of all animal existence. He made it come back, for example, into a pig.” “There are some men,” said Madame Beulie, “who still have the souls of pigs.” “Without doubt,” said Adolphe, smiling; “but what Pythagoras says is that we must not conclude from that, that pigs have the souls of men. Plato also adopts this doctrine. It is the first which gave in the Phidon the proof that souls do not exile themselves forever and that they come back to animate bodies anew.” “Oh, if we could only get proof of that it would be nothing for me to die,” declared old Mlle. Tabouret, who had a mortal terror of dying. “Here are the proofs,” continued Adolphe. “They are two in number. One is taken from the general law of Nature, the other from human nature. First, Nature is governed by the laws of contraries, and from that we see that while death succeeds life, all would end by being absorbed in death, and Nature would one day come to an end like Endymion. Therefore I say that we exist after death. “Secondly, if after consulting the general laws of Nature we turn to our own minds, we will find there the same dogma attested by the fact of resemblance. ‘To learn,’ said Plato, ‘is nothing but to recollect. Since our souls learn, they must have a resemblance. What does it recollect except to have lived, and to have lived in another body? Why can we not believe that in leaving the body while it is animate at this time it can animate several others in succession?’ I quote Plato literally,” remarked Adolphe. Then he passed from Plato to a modern authority. “Charles Fournier has said: ‘Where is the old man who has not truly wished to be born again, and to use in another life the experience he has acquired in this?’ To pretend that that desire ought not to be realized is to admit that God can deceive us. We ought then to recognize that we have lived previous to being what we are, and that several other lives await us. All these lives, to the number of eight hundred and ten, are distributed between five periods and embrace a span of eighty-one thousand years. Allan Hardai reckons that the soul returns to another body after two or three thousand years unless we die a violent death. Then it is quite possible one can be reincarnated after two hundred years.”