IV + 

How Doctor Heraclius Spent His Nights + 

When Doctor Heraclius returned home he was generally much fatter than when he went out, for each of his pockets⁠—and he had eighteen of them⁠—was stuffed with old books of a philosophical nature, which he had just bought in the Ruelle des Vieux Pigeons; and the facetious Rector would pretend that if a chemist had analysed him at that moment it would have been found quite two-thirds of the Doctor’s composition was old paper. + 

At seven o’clock Heraclius Gloss sat down to table and as he ate perused the ancient books which he had just acquired. At half-past eight he rose with dignity: he was no longer the alert and lively little man that he had been all day, but a serious thinker whose brow was bent under the weight of deep meditation, like the shoulders of a porter under too heavy a load. Having thrown to his housekeeper a majestic: “I am at home to no one,” he disappeared into his study, and once there sat down before a desk heaped with books and⁠ ⁠… pondered. Truly a strange sight for anyone who could have seen into the doctor’s mind at that moment⁠—this monstrous procession of contrasting divinities and disparate beliefs, this fantastic interlacing of doctrines and hypotheses. His mind was like an arena in which the champions of all the philosophies tilted against each other in a colossal tournament. He amalgamated, combined, and mixed the old Oriental spiritualism with German materialism, the ethics of the Apostles with those of the Epicureans. He tried combinations of doctrine as one experiments in a laboratory with chemical compounds, but without ever seeing the Truth which he so much desired come bubbling to the surface; and his good friend the Warden maintained that this philosophic truth, eternally waited, was very like a philosopher’s stone⁠—a stumbling block. + 

At midnight the Doctor went to bed and his dreams when asleep were the same as those of his waking hours. + 