"In the rue Olivier de Serres."
"Where is that?"
"Near the rue de Vaugirard, away up."
"Is that where Docre lives?"
"No, we are going to a private house which belongs to a lady he knows. Now, if you'll be so good, put off your cross-examination to some other time, because I am in an awful hurry. At nine o'clock. Don't forget. Be all ready."
He had hardly time to kiss her and she was gone.
"Well," said he, "I already had data on incubacy and poisoning by spells. There remained only the Black Mass, to make me thoroughly acquainted with Satanism as it is practised in our day. And I am to see it! I'll be damned if I thought there were such undercurrents in Paris. And how circumstances hang together and lead to each other! I had to occupy myself with Gilles de Rais and the diabolism of the Middle Ages to get contemporary diabolism revealed to me." And he thought of Docre again. "What a sharper that priest is! Among the occultists who maunder today in the universal decomposition of ideas he is the only one who interests me.
"The others, the mages, the theosophists, the cabalists, the spiritists, the hermetics, the Rosicrucians, remind me, when they are not mere thieves, of children playing and scuffling in a cellar. And if one descend lower yet, into the hole-in-the-wall places of the pythonesses, clairvoyants, and mediums, what does one find except agencies of prostitution and gambling? All these pretended peddlers of the future are extremely nasty; that's the only thing in the occult of which one can be sure."
Des Hermies interrupted the course of these reflections by ringing and walking in. He came to announce that Gévingey had returned and that they were all to dine at Carhaix's the night after next.
"Is Carhaix's bronchitis cured?"