"He said, or rather sobbed, in a lamentable voice: 'My Beloved! My Beloved! I believed that I was thy son, O My Beloved! I took my shadow for thy light! O My Beloved! Thou hast humbled my pride; I am only a little bit of the Night, at the bottom of the obscure Abyss, I, the Man of Light. And the Night does not _will_! And I have willed, I: the Night! I am only a dark son of the Silence, Æon, Source of Æons! And I have wished to _speak_! Ah, Life! Life! To know Life! To possess Life! To equal Life!... Temptation! Vertigo of the eternal Abyss! Mystery of the Ternary! Three! Yes; the three worlds are _one_! And the world is three! It was the truth at Tyre, at Memphis! At Babylon! One! Two! Three! Active, Passive, and Reactive! One and One make two! Two is neuter! But! But! But, O My Beloved! One and Two make Twelve. One is God! Two is matter! Put matter beside God! Pythagoras has said it, and you have Twelve. That means Union!... That means? That means? Who then here below has dared to pronounce the words: _That means?_' "Then he sobbed in the most heart-rending fashion, while Theophrastus on his camp-bed said: "'I should like very much to get out of this.'" CHAPTER XVII THEOPHRASTUS BEGINS TO TAKE AN INTEREST IN THINGS The unlucky Theophrastus was more than six weeks recovering from his Astral operation. M. Lecamus describes his illness in a somewhat long-winded fashion. Little by little he began to recover the use of his legs; but it seemed unlikely that his hearing would ever quite recover from the boiling water which had deafened Cartouche two hundred years before; at intervals he was for a few moments stone deaf. During all this time he made no allusion to the Past; I do not speak of that wretched past, bounded in the minds of all of us by the few years which have elapsed since our last terrestrial birth; he made no allusion to _his eighteenth-century past_. This fact assured Marceline, M. Lecamus, and M. Eliphas de Saint-Elme de Taillebourg de la Nox, who was a frequent visitor at the sick-bed, that Cartouche was indeed dead; and M. de la Nox was often heard to thank Æon, Source of Æons, for this happy event. Theophrastus, as his legs healed, had serious thoughts of returning to business. He had retired young, at the age of forty-one, owing to his invention of a superior rubber stamp which had ousted the rubber stamps of rival manufacturers from the market. His mind was full of yet another innovation which would revolutionise the whole Rubber-stamp Industry. There could be no stronger symptom of a complete cure, no stronger proof that the operation had not weakened his mind. And when he began to get about again, Mme. Longuet found that he had become so _natural_ that she, and M. Lecamus along with her, believed that their misfortunes had at last tired out Destiny. _Theophrastus would never have his Black Feather again: it had been extirpated for the rest of time._