The Abbé's little gray eyes twinkled. He answered with a melancholy smile: "The final and irreparable failure of my religious faith was a fearful blow to me. I no longer believed. What had appeared to me good evidence on the day before looked to me from that day onward like the irrational wanderings of delirium. But I realize to-day, after so many years of meditation, that although my old conceptions of existence could not stand the test of experience, yet the framework of my mind has remained the same. I had abandoned the Theological Absolute; I was in search of a Scientific Absolute, no more to be found than the other. I do not regret my error, for I owe to it the greatest joys of my life. For thirty years the marvel of seeing the veil of Isis slowly raised, and the world, bit by bit, taken to pieces and put together again, according to infallible laws, brought me the supreme delight of grasping the world by thought. When I had exhausted analysis and synthesis, I undertook to tell my discoveries, and such was my mastery of my subject that in ten years I wrote a volume of five hundred pages, in which, I can say it now, for I have burned it, was contained what, in incalculable centuries to come, will be considered the treasure of human knowledge." "You burned this work of yours?" "Yes, to replace it by another." "And is this other one final?" "You want my complete confession? I am so near death that I will afford you this pleasure. Having finished my book, I decided to devote the rest of my life to going over it, pen in hand, and annotating it. Alas! When I became my own critic I found the fine frenzy of creation replaced by a power of keenly reasoning destructiveness which I had up to that time not suspected in myself. The creators of systems in the past were only gifted with the power of induction and prophecy. I had the power to dissect, to undermine my own inductions and prophecies. What we term truth is but an elimination of errors. I thought, I still think, that I had attained truth, pure and simple, but the edifice so laboriously built could not escape the pitiless criticism of the builder. The same mental gymnastics which had led to my replacing former doubts by demonstrated affirmations now raised fresh doubts in the face of my new demonstrations. What would have been their effect upon the unprepared intelligences for which the result of my labour was intended? I spent five years of painful spiritual tension in rewriting and condensing my work." "And this time you were satisfied?"