Thus the good man meditated, his heart beating, and the crowd, the vehicles, the shops, and edifices about him having no power to draw him from his recollections. Sometimes, however, the aspect of the spot he was passing changed the current of his melancholy musing: there, by the custom-house, under the roof of that high house, reflected in the Ile, and looking down upon the passing boats, was his garret-chamber; his little ink-stained deal table, his bed hung with blue curtains in the recess, and he, Frantz Mathéus, young, with his elbows on an ancient folio spread before a solitary candle, studying the principles of the learned Paracelsus, who places the soul in the stomach; of the profound La Caze, who fixes it in the tendonous centre of the diaphragm; of the judicious Ernest Platner, who makes it drawn in with the atmosphere by the lungs; of the sublime Descartes, who incloses it in the pineal gland—of all those great masters of human thoughts. Yes, he again saw all this, and smiled gently; for since then how many precious facts, how many learned discoveries, had been stored in his mind! “Ah!” he said to himself, “if the body exhausts itself and becomes feeble, the intelligence develops itself every day. Eternal youth of the soul, which cannot grow old, and completes itself by successive transformations!” Still farther on was the dwelling of Louise—of good, innocent Louise—who span, singing a simple air, while he, Mathéus, seated on a stool at her feet, gazed on her for entire hours, murmuring, “Louise, do you truly love me?” And she would answer, “You know well, Frantz, that I love you.” Oh, sweet memories! can all have been but a dream? The good man gave himself up to the charm of these distant recollections; he seemed still to be hearing Louise’s spinning-wheel humming in the silence, when the voice of Coucou Peter scattered his charming illusions. “Where are you going, Maître Frantz?” he asked. “Where duty calls us,” replied Mathéus. “Yes, but to what place?” “To wherever is most proper for the propagation of the doctrine.” They had reached the Rue des Arcades, and halted under a lamp. “Are you not hungry, Maître Frantz?” inquired Coucou Peter. “Slightly, my friend.” “Like me,” said the disciple, scratching his ear; “the Great Demiourgos ought to send us a supper.” Mathéus looked at Coucou Peter; he had not in the least the appearance of jesting, and this fact made Mathéus himself very serious. For more than a quarter of an hour they watched the people passing through the arcades—sellers crying their wares, pretty girls stopping at the shop-windows, students jingling their spurs on the pavement and smacking their riding-whips, grave professors making their way through the crowd, with packets of books under their arms. At length Coucou Peter said—