"M. de la Nox, indeed, did not hesitate; he had tried reason in vain, though for a moment we had believed it victorious: an operation was indicated. Madame Longuet made a few protests, so half-hearted that we ignored them. As for Theophrastus, it was useless to ask his opinion. Besides, M. de la Nox had already fixed him with his gaze; and no one has ever resisted the gaze of M. de la Nox. "Theophrastus breathed several deep sighs, and began to tremble violently. But when M. de la Nox cried: 'I order you to sleep, Cartouche!' he fell back into the armchair behind him and never stirred. His breathing was so faint that we might almost have doubted that he was still living. "The operation of the death of Cartouche was about to begin. I knew, from several famous instances, that it was an operation of great difficulty, for one always risks, in essaying to kill a reincarnate soul, that is to say, to cast back into nothingness that part of the Individuality which has been someone in a previous existence, and pursues us into this with a violence which prevents us from living in the Present--one always risks, I say, _killing along with the reincarnate soul the body in which it is reincarnate_. We were going to try to kill Cartouche without killing Theophrastus, _but we might kill Theophrastus_. Hence our anxiety. "It needed all the authority, all the science, and also the absolute calmness of M. de la Nox to render me at all at ease in the extremity in which we found ourselves. But M. de la Nox has the most powerful and dominating will the world has known since Jacques Molay, whom he has succeeded in the supreme command of the actual and secret Order of the Templars. "Also I bore in mind the categorical demonstrations of his last treatise on Psychical Surgery, and the exact precision of his instructions in his monograph on the _Astral Scalpel_. My trust in M. de la Nox, and the criminal eccentricity of poor Theophrastus, of which the ears of the wretched Signor Petito had been the first victims and filled me with dread of irremediable catastrophes, led me to consider the operation of the death of Cartouche, in spite of its danger, the best course in these painful circumstances. "We carried the sleeping Theophrastus down into the basement, into the psychical laboratory of the Mage, which is lighted night and day by great hissing flames of a crimson gas of the nature of which I am ignorant.