I took advantage of this moment to renew our conversation.
"Excuse me, monsieur," I said, "but at the conclusion of the prologue you said,'How absurd!'"
"Yes," said my neighbour, "I suppose I did say so; or, if I did not say it, I certainly thought it."
"Do you then condemn the use of supernatural beings in the drama?"
"Not at all; on the contrary, I admire it extremely. All the great masters have made potent use of it: Shakespeare in Hamlet, in Macbeth and in Julius Cæsar; Molière in le Festin de pierre, which he ought rather to have called le Convive de pierre, for his title to be really significant; Voltaire in Sémiramis; Goethe in Faust. No, on the contrary, I highly approve of the use of the supernatural, because I believe in it."
"What! you have faith in the supernatural?"
"Most certainly."
"In everyday life?"
"Certainly. We elbow every moment against beings who are unknown to us because they are invisible to us: the air, fire, the earth, are all inhabited. Sylphs, gnomes, water-sprites, hobgoblins, bogies, angels, demons, fly, float, crawl and leap around us. What are those shooting stars of the night, meteors which astronomers in vain try to explain to us, and of which they can discover neither cause nor end, if they are not angels carrying God's orders from one world to another? Some day we shall see it all."
"Did you say, we shall see?"