"Oh, but so far you've seen nothing—nothing at all!" cried Theophrastus.
The Mage reflected a moment; then he took Theophrastus to a map of the Paris of to-day which hung on the wall of this great library, and pointed out to him the exact spot on which had stood Chopinettes mill, Cock mill, and the Gallows of Montfaucon. Then he laid his finger in the middle of the triangle they formed, and said: "Here is where you must hunt, my friend, to recover your treasures. But all this quarter has been altered again and again; and I very much doubt whether your treasures will still be found where you buried them. I have shown you the spot on a modern map, to clear your mind of the matter. For, my friend, you must clear your mind. You must not dwell on your treasures. You must not live in the past. It is a crime. You must live in the present, that is to say, for the Future. My friend, you must drive out Cartouche, because Cartouche is no more. It is Theophrastus Longuet who is."
The Mage pronounced these words in a tone of the most solemn earnestness. Theophrastus smiled at him sadly, and said: "I'm very much obliged to you for your interest in me; and I will not hide from you the fact that I find you extremely sympathetic, in spite of your skeletons and the odd words which crawl about your walls. You must be very learned indeed, to judge from all these shelves full of books. And you must be very good-hearted, for you have certainly treated me with the greatest kindness; but I tell you—and sorry I am to say it—that you can do nothing for me. For unfortunately, my dear sir, you think that I'm ill; but I'm not ill at all. If I were ill, I've no doubt that you'd cure me, but one doesn't cure a man who's not ill. You say to me, you must drive out Cartouche. It's a grand thing to say, splendid; but I don't believe it, my dear M. Elephant de Brandebourg de St. Elmo's Fire de la Box."
But the Mage took his hand, and said with unchanged kindliness:
"None the less Cartouche must be driven out, for if we do not succeed in driving him out, we shall have to kill him; and I will not conceal from you, my dear M. Longuet, the fact that that is an exceedingly difficult operation."
"When the Man of Light," says Theophrastus in his memoirs, "undertook to relieve me of this obsession by Cartouche, which was not, alas! a matter of imagination but a very real thing, I could only smile pitifully at his vast conceit. But when I understood that he proposed to drive him out by the sole miracle of the reason, I thought it was time to serve the Mage up hot at Charenton lunatic asylum.
"But presently, when he had explained the matter more fully to me, and I began to understand his theory and method, I found myself in full agreement with him and ready to serve his purpose of driving Cartouche out of me by the sole miracle of the reason. Indeed I came in the end to appreciate the vast abyss which separated the Man of Light from my friend Adolphe, the vast abyss which will always separate the Man of Reason from the Learned Ape.
"First of all, he assured me that I had been Cartouche. He was assured of it. And furthermore it was the most natural thing in the world. He said he had scolded Adolphe for having presented my case to him as exceptional, when my case was the case of everybody. Of course, everybody has not been Cartouche. But everybody has been, before their existence of to-day, a good many other people, among whom may very well have been found persons every whit as bad as Cartouche.
"You understand the Man of Light: mine was an every-day case. Everybody has lived before living and will live again. He told me that it was 'The Law of Karma.' One is being born all the time; one never dies. And when one dies, it is that one is being born again, and so on from the beginning of beginnings!
"It is understood that at each birth the personality differs from the preceding and succeeding personalities, but each is only a modification of the divine and spiritual ego. These different personalities are in a way only the rings in the infinite chain of life which constitutes throughout the ages our Immortal Individuality.