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Dom Claude's fame had spread far and wide It procured for him, at about the epoch when he refused to see Mada re He had just retired, after the office, to his canon's cell in the cloister of Notre-Dalass phials, relegated to a corner, and filled with a decidedly equivocal powder, which strongly resembled the alchee or mysterious There were, indeed, here and there, some inscriptions on the walls, but they were pure sentences of learning and piety, extracted froood authors The archdeacon had just seated hiht of a three-jetted copper lamp, before a vast coffer crammed with manuscripts He had rested his elbow upon the open volume of Honorius d'Autun, ~De predestinatione et libero arbitrio~, and he was turning over, in deep meditation, the leaves of a printed folio which he had just brought, the sole product of the press which his cell contained In the midst of his revery there came a knock at his door "Who's there?" cried the learned , disturbed over his bone

A voice without replied, "Your friend, Jacques Coictier" He went to open the door

It was, in fact, the king's physician; a person about fifty years of age, whose harsh physiognomy was modified only by a crafty eye Anotherslate-colored robes, furred with irded and closed, with caps of the same stuff and hue Their hands were concealed by their sleeves, their feet by their robes, their eyes by their caps

"God helptheuished visitors at such an hour" And while speaking in this courteous fashion he cast an uneasy and scrutinizing glance from the physician to his companion

"'Tis never too late to come and pay a visit to so considerable a learned man as Dom Claude Frollo de Tirechappe," replied Doctor Coictier, whose Franche-Co with the majesty of a train-robe

There then ensued between the physician and the archdeacon one of those congratulatory prologues which, in accordance with custom, at that epoch preceded all conversations between learnedeach other in the most cordial manner in the world However, it is the sa another wise all

Claude Frollo's felicitations to Jacques Coictier bore reference principally to the tees which the worthy physician had found means to extract, in the course of his , an operation of alchemy much better and more certain than the pursuit of the philosopher's stone