At the moment when Gazonal was thus endeavouring to collect himself, a voice--an infernal voice--made him bound in his chair; the black hen clucked. “Go back, my daughter, go back; monsieur chooses to spend only five francs.” The hen seemed to understand her mistress, for, after coming within a foot of the cards, she turned and resumed her former place. “What flower to you like best?” asked the old woman, in a voice hoarsened by the phlegm which seemed to rise and fall incessantly in her bronchial tubes. “The rose.” “What color are you fond of?” “Blue.” “What animal do you prefer?” “The horse. Why these questions?” he asked. “Man derives his form from his anterior states,” she said sententiously. “Hence his instincts; and his instincts rule his destiny. What food do you like best to eat,--fish, game, cereals, butcher’s meat, sweet things, vegetables, or fruits?” “Game.” “In what month where you born?” “September.” “Put out your hand.” Madame Fontaine looked attentively at the lines of the hand that was shown to her. It was all done seriously, with no pretence of sorcery; on the contrary, with the simplicity a notary might have shown when asking the intentions of a client about a deed. Presently she shuffled the cards, and asked Gazonal to cut them, and then to make three packs of them himself. After which she took the packs, spread them out before her, and examined them as a gambler examines the thirty-six numbers at roulette before he risks his stake. Gazonal’s bones were freezing; he seemed not to know where he was; but his amazement grew greater and greater when this hideous old woman in a green bonnet, stout and squat, whose false front was frizzed into points of interrogation, proceeded, in a thick voice, to relate to him all the particular circumstances, even the most secret, of his past life: she told him his tastes, his habits, his character; the thoughts of his childhood; everything that had influenced his life; a marriage broken off, why, with whom, the exact description of the woman he had loved; and, finally, the place he came from, his lawsuit, etc. Gazonal at first thought it was a hoax prepared by his companions; but the absolute impossibility of such a conspiracy appeared to him almost as soon as the idea itself, and he sat speechless before that truly infernal power, the incarnation of which borrowed from humanity a form which the imagination of painters and poets has throughout all ages regarded as the most awful of created things,--namely, a toothless, hideous, wheezing hag, with cold lips, flattened nose, and whitish eyes. The pupils of those eyes had brightened, through them rushed a ray,--was it from the depths of the future or from hell? Gazonal asked, interrupting the old creature, of what use the toad and the hen were to her.