CHAPTER XV.
The memory of these frightful magisteria kept racing through his head next day, and, while smoking cigarettes beside the fire, Durtal thought of Docre and Johannes fighting across Gevingey's back, smiting and parrying with incantations and exorcisms.
"In the Christian symbolism," he said to himself, "the fish is one of the representations of Christ.

Doubtless the Canon thinks to aggravate his sacrileges by feeding fishes on genuine hosts.

His is the reverse of the system of the mediaeval witches who chose a vile beast dedicated to the Devil to submit the body of the Saviour to the processes of digestion.

How real is the pretended power which the deicide chemists are alleged to wield?
What faith can we put in the tales of evoked larvae killing a designated person to order with corrosive oil and blood virus?
None, unless one is extremely credulous, and even a bit mad.
"And yet, come to think of it, we find today, unexplained and surviving under other names, the mysteries which were so long reckoned the product of mediaeval imagination and superstition.

At the charity hospital Dr.
Louis transfers maladies from one hypnotized person to another.