Only a few grains of the precious powder then remained in his left hand, and these he shook to the ground.

This time, when even the golden signature placed at the foot of the page was perfectly dry, Gérard let all the metal filings extraneous to the text fall haphazardly on the table by holding the opulent volume upright first of all, then closing it and setting it down.

After a long moment during which he seemed to engage in deep reflec­tion, Gérard espied the pile of octavo books and took up the top volume, simply bound in paper, which bore the title The Eocene upon its cover.

After pushing the dictionary aside, he placed this on the table and skimmed through the latter part of it, soon stopping at the first page of a two-column index. Here, words were arranged successively in a list, which he touched rapidly with his fingers one after another in order to count them. Then, on the following pages where the index continued, Gérard engaged in the same quick enumeration, without skipping anything, until, at the last word on one of the pages, he halted and stood up.

Walking away from us toward the window, he took the gold bracelet momentarily from his pocket and scraped the crown piece once more against the spike of the bar that he had already used. Collecting a very small quantity of glittering powder this time in his left hand, he settled himself again in front of The Eocene.

In the center, right at the top of the page where he had stopped counting, he wrote “Cell Days,” in his usual manner, but using printed capitals throughout. Above the left-hand column he wrote “Credit,” and beneath the right-hand one “Debit.” The latter title was written directly back to front — without difficulty, thanks to the geometrical simplicity of the characters adopted.

Next, Gérard struck out the first word actually printed in the first column.

The supply of powder had just sufficed to gild the water of the letters and of the erasure. When all moisture had vanished from the paper, Gérard held the volume for a moment at right angles to the table, upon which lightly tumbled all the grains that had escaped the delicate liming.

After placing his finger below the number immediately following the word scratched out, he skimmed through the beginning of the work as though looking for a certain page.

∗ ∗ ∗

At that moment Canterel made us walk a little to the right along the enormous, transparent cage and halted us in front of a very ornamental Catholic altar facing us behind the glass partition, with a priest in a chasuble before its tabernacle. The warmly accoutred assistant, who was leaving this place after performing some task there, bent his steps toward Gérard’s retreat, which he entered for an instant.

On the sacred table, to the right, was a rich and very antique-looking metal chest whose principle side bore these words in letters made of garnets beneath the lock: “The Unseasonable Vice of Golden Weddings.”

The priest walked toward it, raised the lid and drew out a rather large vice of very simple design, which functioned by means of a wing nut. Descending the altar steps, he stopped before a very aged couple, who had risen at his approach, vacating two ceremonial chairs placed side by side with their backs toward us. The man wore a simple dress coat and was hatless, while to his left, in deep mourning and with her head enveloped in a black shawl, his wife was snugly wrapped in a heavy mantle — though like him she had her hands uncovered.

Setting the two old people face to face, the priest united right hands, which he placed, tightly clasped together, between the vice’s parted jaws; then, gently, he began to turn the nut, which was orientated ostentatiously in our direction.

But the man smilingly intervened with his left hand and compelled the priest to let him take the metal wings, which he cheerfully turned several times himself, with mischievous and deliberate vigor, while his wife sobbed with emotion. The jaws must have been made of some soft imitation of iron, for they yielded without inflicting any suffering upon the two interlocked right hands.

When it became free again, the nut was carefully unscrewed by the priest, who soon carried away the vice and remounted the altar steps to approach the chest — while the couple returned to their seats, their long and solemn handclasp ended.

∗ ∗ ∗

Then Canterel led us several meters further along the giant cage, to the front of a magnificent building from which we saw the assistant in furs emerge, bustling toward the aged couple: he had gone there unobtrusively just before, by an indirect route that passed behind the altar.

Facing us, a very short way behind the dividing wall of glass, was an unelevated theatrical stage, with a set suggesting the sumptuous hall of some medieval castle. The absence of a rail enabled the assistant to enter and leave without difficulty by the front.

Toward the back, and slightly to the left, was a nobleman seen in profile with his neck uncovered, who sat, annotating a book, at a table placed askew, opposite a cant wall pierced by a large window. Upon his neck a Gothic monogram was visible consisting of the three letters B, T and G, in dark gray. In the center, right at the back, stood a man carrying a parchment, whom we saw full face in front of a closed door, precisely to the nobleman’s right and several paces from him. The costumes of the two actors harmonized well, as to period, with the set.

In a tone of distinct irony, and without interrupting his notes or in any way changing his attitude, the nobleman said:

“Really . . . a note of hand? . . . What does it show as a signature? . . .”

His voice reached us through a round opening as large as a dinner plate, contrived in the glass partition two meters from the ground, which was covered simply by a disc of tissue paper with its overlapping edges stuck to the outside of the rim.

A girl in black, positioned just under this bull’s-eye so as to hear distinctly, was staring intently through the glass all the while to the man who had just spoken.

To the question asked, the man with the parchment made this brief reply:

“A cob.”

The very instant this latter word rang out, the nobleman spread his fingers and twisted his head to the right with amazing abruptness, moving his hands at once to the nape of his neck, as though from the effect of a pain which was nonetheless quickly forgotten.

Then he rose and went unsteadily toward the man, who held the parchment up before his eyes; upon it the words “Note of Hand” served as a heading to several lines followed by a name, beneath which a horse with a short, thick neck was crudely delineated.

Pointing his finger at the equestrian sketch, the nobleman repeated in a tone of extreme anguish: “The cob! . . . The cob! . . .”

∗ ∗ ∗

But already Canterel was making us move a short distance further in the same direction, to halt before a child of about seven, dressed in a plain blue indoor costume, with his head and his legs uncovered. He was sitting on the knee of a warmly wrapped young woman in mourning, settled in a chair standing right on the ground. The assistant, who had approached the child for a moment by way of a detour behind the stage, was now striding toward the actor with the uncovered neck.

A second bull’s-eye, precisely similar to the first, enabled us clearly to hear the little boy, who was in any case not far from us through the transparent wall. He pronounced the title “Virelai cousu” by Ronsard, then accurately recited the whole of a piece of verse, with his eyes gazing into those of the young woman, and his gestures most aptly illustrating every meaning contained in the text.

∗ ∗ ∗

When the childish voice had fallen silent, we went a little way with Canterel in the customary direction and stationed ourselves, round a young observer, in front of a man in an undyed smock, who was seated at a table standing against the inside of the glass partition, which he faced. The assistant left him and went toward the little boy, behind whom he had modestly passed in a fairly wide curve during the recitation, so as to cause no disturbance.

The man in the smock, displaying the noble head of an artist, with long gray hair, was bent over a sheet of paper completely blackened with well-dried ink. With the aid of a fine scraper he began to make some white appear on it, brushing the light scrapings aside from time to time with the lateral tip of his little finger.

Little by little beneath the blade, which he handled with consummate skill, there emerged, in white on black, the full-face portrait of a Pierrot — or rather, in view of certain details imitated from Watteau, of a clown.

The young observer in our midst, with his forehead almost pressed against the glass, was watching the artist’s subtle operations with great attention, while the latter, unable to control his mirth, several times uttered the phrase “One gross ditto” — which was carried to the outside by a third bull’s-eye identical to the others.

The work went on apace, and despite the strangeness of the purely eliminatory procedure, the clown was most elaborately drawn. At last he showed himself, full of exuberant life, with his hands on his hips and his face wreathed in laughter. The fine ink lines that the steel adroitly left behind constituted a truly graceful and charming masterpiece, whose value we could appreciate even though, from our position, we were obliged to look at it upside down.

When this had all been completed, the scraper once more demon­strated the mastery of the hand that wielded it, by composing lower down, the same clown seen from the back, still in white on the previously blackened sheet; the complete identity of pose, appearance and proportions in the two productions made it impossible to doubt the singleness of the artist’s conception. In this one also the parts deliberately missed out by the astutely suppressive blade formed an admirable whole which, even seen the wrong way up, fascinated us by the elegance of its finish.

When the artist had completed the final retouching and laid down his scraper, he stood up to take the sheet away, and spread it out slightly further from us on the revolving platform of a sculptor’s turntable — where a small armature of iron wire, in the form of a man, stood next to a set of roughing chisels and a white, lidless cardboard box, whose front displayed the words “Nocturnal Wax,” in large, inked letters.

The back of the armature was attached to a rigid vertical metal rod, with its base expanded into a disc and fastened by a screw to a wooden block set on a revolving platform. Thanks to the softness of the iron wire, the artist, by manipulating the armature, easily gave it exactly the same attitude as the clown which his scraper had just created.

Then he plunged his hand into the box and withdrew a thick stick of a kind of black wax flecked with tiny white grains, which, being reminiscent of a starry night, justified the name traced on the box. He enveloped the head, trunk and limbs of the armature, one after the other, in this nocturnal wax, then replaced all that was left of the stick in the box.

Using only his fingers, he began to give the work thus prepared a fairly definite form, continuing his task with a roughing chisel selected from among his large supply; the latter, in view of its whitish color, peculiar texture and hard, dry appearance, was evidently made of the white of bread, first shaped and then allowed to become stale.

The further the work progressed, the better we were able to recognize the figurine as the clown we had beheld just now, of which it was an exact sculptural copy — as was in any case testified by the enquiring glances which the artist incessantly darted at the black-grounded sheet.

The chisels, of varied and most unusual shapes, and composed, without exception, of hardened bread white, each served in turn.

The wax removed by the artist in his modeling was collected between the fingers of his left hand in a diminutive ball, upon which he occasionally drew for various additions.

In conjunction with his sculpting task, the active creator performed another which, although in itself a work of pure supererogation, seemed to be an indispensable aid to him in consequence of some inflexible routine: with each chisel he collected certain white specks in the nocturnal wax, which he then aligned on the statuette’s surface to form lines precisely imitating those in the ink of the model that guided him; even when he came to the laughing face he acquitted himself of this singular task, which was more delicate there than anywhere else.

From time to time he swiveled the turntable more or less, so as to tackle some other side of the work; then he would move the guiding sheet to have the two images, which served him in turn, right before his eyes — thrusting the box of wax aside when it obstructed him.

The clown made rapid progress and acquired an incomparable delicacy. In one place the artist would hide beneath the wax, unwanted white specks blemishing the work; elsewhere on the other hand, when the surface was insufficiently supplied, he would delve down slightly to procure some.

At last we had an exquisite black figurine before our eyes, which, due to the discreet highlighting in white, was a perfect negative of the playful clown whose positive was shown upon the sheet.

∗ ∗ ∗

After advancing again in the same direction, at a sign from Canterel, our group posted itself before a circular grille nearly two meters high and about one pace in diameter, in the form of a cramped cage bathed in blue light, not far behind the transparent wall dividing us from it. Binding the whole thing together were two horizontal iron circles, one above and the other below, which appeared to be completely spanned by all the bars; four of these, particularly stout and situated at the four corners of an imaginary square with two sides parallel to the glass partition, entered a fairly large floorboard, which the others did not reach.

A sick and wasted man, in dressing gown and sandals, was lying on a stretcher with a peculiar kind of helmet on his head; leaving him was the assistant who had preceded us by a detour, in accordance with his custom. The latter took a large key from his pocket and inserted it in a lock placed halfway up one of the thick bars, the one on the left furthest from us.