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was by birth a nobleman. He desired to be wiser than other, honest folks, and to discover an elixir against death; for of all things he feared to die. He had learnt in an old book the art of calling demons into his presence. He left Cracow, in which city he was a doctor of medicine, secretly at midnight, and came to Podgorze, where he began his magical arts to summon the demon from the deep. The evil spirit soon appeared. As was customary in those days, the two entered into a covenant. The demon knelt on the ground and wrote out a bond, which Twardowski signed with his own blood, squeezed out of the third finger of his left hand. The chief condition of the covenant was this: the demon should have no power over the body or soul of Twardowski unless he could catch him in Rome.

By virtue of the bond executed between them,