XVI + 

How the Forty-Second Reading of the Manuscript Shed New Light Into the Doctor’s Mind + 

Just as a rich man can derive new pleasures and new satisfactions from his great fortune, so Doctor Heraclius, in possession of the inestimable manuscript, made surprising discoveries therein each time that he reread it. + 

One evening when he had finished reading it for the forty-second time, a sudden idea flashed upon him like lightning. As we have already seen, the Doctor could tell approximately at what date a man who had disappeared would end his transmigrations and reappear in his first form. He was thus suddenly thunderstruck by the thought that the author of the manuscript might have regained his place in humanity. Then, as feverishly excited as an alchemist who thinks himself on the point of discovering the philosopher’s stone, he set to work on the most minute calculations to establish the probability of this supposition and after several hours of persistent work on abstruse metempsychosic deductions, he managed to convince himself that this man must be his contemporary or at any rate be on the point of being reborn to the life of reason. But Heraclius possessed no document which indicated the precise date of the great metempsychosist’s death and therefore could not fix for certain the moment of his return. + 

He had hardly glimpsed the possibility of discovering this being who in his eyes was more than man, more than philosopher, almost more than God, when he was conscious of one of those profound emotions such as one experiences when one suddenly learns that one’s father, whom for years one had thought dead, is living and close to one. A holy anchorite who had sustained himself all his life on the love and remembrance of Christ and who realised suddenly that his God was about to appear before him, would not have been more overcome than was Doctor Heraclius when he had convinced himself that he would one day meet the author of the manuscript. + 