"Nor will he get anything so good at any other religious retreat," said the Abbé Plomb.
"Do not discourage me beforehand," said Durtal, laughing; "let me enjoy this without a pang—there is a time for all things."
"Then you are fully determined," said the Abbé Gévresin, "to write a paper for your Review on allegorical beasts?"
"Yes, Monsieur l'Abbé."
"I have made a list for you from the works of Fillion and of Lesêtre of the blunders made by the translators of the Bible when they disguised real beasts under chimerical names," said the Abbé Plomb. "This, in a few words, is the upshot of my researches.
"There was never any mythological fauna in the Sacred Books. The Hebrew text was misread by those who translated it into Greek and Latin, and the strange zoology that we find in certain chapters of Isaiah and Job is easily reduced to the nomenclature of well-known creatures.
"Thus the onocentaurs and sirens, spoken of by the Prophet, are neither more nor less than jackals, if we examine the Hebrew original. The lamia, a vampire, half woman and half serpent like the wyvern, is a night bird, the white or the screech owl; the satyrs and fauns, the hairy beasts spoken of in the Vulgate, are, after all, no more than wild goats—'schirim,' as they are called in the Mosaic original.
"The reptile so frequently mentioned in the Bible under the name of 'dragon' is indicated in the original by various words, which sometimes mean the serpent or the crocodile, sometimes the jackal, and sometimes the whale; and the
famous unicorn of the Scriptures is merely the primæval bull or auroch, which is to be seen on the Assyrian bas-reliefs—a race now dying out, lingering only in the remotest parts of Lithuania and the Caucasus."
"And Behemoth and Leviathan, spoken of by Job?"