“For some time,” said he with a bitter smile, “I have failed in all my experiments. A fixed idea possesses me, and tortures my brain like the presence of a fiery stigma. I have not even succeeded in discovering the secret of Cassiodorus, whose lamp burned without wick or oil. Surely a simple matter enough!”

“The devil it is!” muttered Jehan between his teeth.

“One miserable thought, then,” continued the priest, “suffices to sap a man’s will and render him feeble- minded. Oh, how Claude Pernelle would mock at me—she who could not for one moment divert Nicholas Flamel from the pursuit of his great work! What! I hold in my hand the magic hammer of Zechieles! At every blow which, from the depths of his cell, the redoubtable rabbi struck with this hammer upon this nail that one among his enemies whom he had condemned would, even were he two thousand leagues away, sink an arm’s length into the earth which swallowed him up. The King of France himself, for having one night inadvertently struck against the door of the magician, sank up to his knees in his own pavement of Paris. This happened not three centuries ago. Well, I have the hammer and the nail, and yet these implements are no more formidable in my hands than a hammer in the hand of a smith. And yet all that is wanting is the magic word which Zechieles pronounced as he struck upon the nail.”

“A mere trifle!” thought Jehan.

“Come let us try,” resumed the Archdeacon eagerly. “If I succeed, I shall see the blue spark fly from the head of the nail. Emen-Héten! That ns not it—Sigeani! Sigeani! May this nail open the grave for whomsoever bears the name of Phœbus! A curse upon it again! Forever that same thought!”

He threw away the hammer angrily. He then sank so low in his arm-chair and over the table that Jehan lost sight of him. For some minutes he could see nothing but a hand clenched convulsively on a book. Suddenly Dom Claude arose, took a pair of compasses, and in silence engraved upon the wall in capitals the Greek word:

’ANÁGKH.

“My brother’s a fool,” said Jehan to himself; “it would have been much simpler to write Fatum. Everybody is not obliged to know Greek.”

The Archdeacon reseated himself in his chair and clasped his forehead between his two hands, like a sick person whose head is heavy and burning.

The scholar watched his brother with surprise. He had no conception—he who always wore his heart upon his sleeve, who observed no laws but the good old laws of nature, who allowed his passions to flow according to their natural tendencies, and in whom the lake of strong emotions was always dry, so many fresh channels did he open for it daily—he had no conception with what fury that sea of human passions ferments and boils when it is refused all egress; how it gathers strength, swells, and overflows; how it wears away the heart; how it breaks forth in inward sobs and stifled convulsions, until it has rent its banks and overflowed its bed. The austere and icy exterior of Claude Frollo, that cold surface of rugged and inaccessible virtue, had always deceived Jehan. The light-hearted scholar had never dreamed of the lava, deep, boiling, furious, beneath the snow of ætna.

We do not know whether any sudden perception of this kind crossed Jehan’s mind; but, scatter-brained as he was, he understood that he had witnessed something he ought never to have seen; that he had surprised the soul of his elder brother in one of its most secret attitudes, and that Claude must not discover it. Perceiving that the Archdeacon had fallen back into his previous immobility, he withdrew his head very softly and made a slight shuffling of feet behind the door, as of some one approaching and giving warning of the fact.

“Come in!” cried the Archdeacon, from within his cell. “I was expecting you, and left the key in the door on purpose. Come in, Maître Jacques!”