Whether one regard Time as a mode of the unique substance, whether it be defined as one of the forms of the conscious ego, or an abstract phase of the immediate externality, or whether one regard it purely as a law, a relation resulting from the progression of Reality, we can affirm that one hundred years is a certain space of time. CHAPTER VI EVERY one knows the end of the enchantment, and how, after a hundred terrestrial cycles, a prince favoured by the fairies penetrated the enchanted wood, and reached the bed where slept the Princess. He was a little German princeling, with a pretty moustache, and rounded hips. As soon as she woke up, she fell, or rather rose so much in love, that she followed him to his little principality in such a hurry that she never said a word to the people of her household, who had slept with her for a hundred years. Her first lady-in-waiting was quite touched thereby, and exclaimed with admiration: “I recognize the blood of my kings.” Boulingrin woke up beside the Duchess de Cicogne at the same time as the Princess and all her household. As he rubbed his eyes, his mistress said: “Boulingrin, you have been asleep.” “Not at all, dear lady, not at all.” He spoke in good faith. Having slept without dreaming for a hundred years, he did not know that he had been asleep. “I have been so little asleep,” he said, “that I can repeat what you said a minute ago.” “Well, what did I say?” “You said, ‘I suspect a dark intrigue.’” As soon as it awoke, the whole of the little Court was discharged; every one had to fend for himself as best he could. Boulingrin and Cicogne hired from the castle steward an old seventeenth-century trap drawn by an animal which was already very aged before it went to sleep for a hundred years, and drove to the station of Eaux-Perdues, where they caught a train which, in two hours, deposited them in the capital of the country. Great was their surprise at all that they saw and heard. But by the end of a quarter of an hour they had exhausted their astonishment, and nothing surprised them any more. As for themselves, nobody took the slightest interest in them. Their story was perfectly incomprehensible, and awakened no curiosity, for our minds are not interested in anything that is too obvious, or too difficult to follow. As one may well believe, Boulingrin had not the remotest idea what had happened to him. But when the Duchess said that it was not natural, he answered: “Dear lady, allow me to observe that you have been badly trained in physics. Nothing exists which is not according to Nature.”