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Updated: May 15, 2025
Flamel, who had spoken in the rapid repressed tone of a man on the verge of anger, stared a moment at this and then, in his natural voice, rejoined, good-humoredly, "Upon my soul, I don't understand you!" The change of key seemed to disconcert Glennard. "It's simple enough " he muttered. "Simple enough your offering me money in return for a friendly service?
Flamel suffered his discourse with the bland inattention that we accord to the affairs of someone else's suburb, and they reached the shelter of Alexa's tea-table without a perceptible turn toward the dreaded topic. The dinner passed off safely.
And still they did not speak. It was several weeks later that, one afternoon by the drawing-room fire, she handed him a letter that she had been reading when he entered. "I've heard from Mr. Flamel," she said. Glennard turned pale. It was as though a latent presence had suddenly become visible to both. He took the letter mechanically. "It's from Smyrna," she said. "Won't you read it?"
The part was a small one Flamel had few intimate friends but composed of more heterogeneous atoms than the little pools into which society usually runs. The reaction from the chief episode of his earlier life had bred in Glennard an uneasy distaste for any kind of personal saliency.
He wondered why his wife had wanted to drag him on such a senseless expedition.... He hated Flamel's crowd and what business had Flamel himself to interfere in that way, standing up for the publication of the letters as though Glennard needed his defence?... Glennard turned his head and saw that Flamel had drawn a seat to Alexa's elbow and was speaking to her in a low tone.
Glennard, of late, was beginning to feel that the surface which, a year ago, he had taken for a sheet of clear glass, might, after all, be a mirror reflecting merely his own conception of what lay behind it. "Do you like Flamel?" he suddenly asked; to which, still engaged with her tea, she returned the feminine answer "I thought you did."
At that time Paris was the centre of the hermetic science in France. The alchemists gathered under the vaults of Notre Dame and studied the hieroglyphics which Nicolas Flamel, before he died, had written on the walls of the charnal Des Innocents and on the portal of Saint Jacques de la Boucherie, describing cabalistically the preparation of the famous stone.
Flamel hesitated; and almost immediately Glennard's scruples gave way to irritation. If at this hour Flamel were to affect an inopportune reluctance ! The older man's answer reassured him. "Why need you assume any responsibility? Your name won't appear, of course; and as to your friend's, I don't see why his should, either. He wasn't a celebrity himself, I suppose?" "No, no."
It is called the "Royal Work of Charles VI. of France, and the Treasure of Philosophy." It is said to be the original from which Nicholas Flamel took the idea of his "Desir Desire." Lenglet du Fresnoy says it is very allegorical, and utterly incomprehensible.
He turned to go; but almost at the same moment he was conscious of a duality of intention wherein his apparent wish to leave revealed itself as a last effort of the will against the overmastering desire to stay and unbosom himself to Flamel. The older man, as though divining the conflict, laid a detaining pressure on his arm. "Won't the engagement keep? Sit down and try one of these cigars.
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