Page:Gaston Leroux--The man with the black feather.djvu/186

164 indeed, to judge from all these shelves full of books. And you must be very good-hearted, for you have certainly treated me with the greatest kindness; but I tell you—and sorry I am to say it—that you can do nothing for me. For unfortunately, my dear sir, you think that I'm ill; but I'm not ill at all. If I were ill, I 've no doubt that you'd cure me, but one does n't cure a man who's not ill. You say to me, you must drive out Cartouche. It's a grand thing to say, splendid; but I don't believe it, my dear M. Elephant de Brandebourg de St. Elmo's Fire de la Box." But the Mage took his hand, and said with unchanged kindliness:

"None the less Cartouche must be driven out, for if we do not succeed in driving him out, we shall have to kill him; and I will not conceal from you, my dear M. Longuet, the fact that that is an exceedingly difficult operation."

"When the Man of Light," says Theophrastus in his memoirs, "undertook to relieve me of this obsession by Cartouche, which was not, alas! a matter of imagination but a very real thing, I could only smile pitifully at his vast conceit. But when I understood that he proposed to drive him out by the sole miracle of