IX + 

Obverse and Reverse + 

Doctor Heraclius was very happy during the days following his surprising discovery. He lived in a state of downright jubilation, he was full of the glory of difficulties overcome, of mysteries unveiled, of great hopes realized. Metempsychosis encompassed him like the sky. It seemed to him that a curtain had been suddenly torn down and that his eyes had been opened to things hitherto unknown. + 

He made his dog sit at table beside him, and in solemn tête-à-têtes before the fire sought to discover in the eye of the innocent beast the mystery of its previous existences. + 

He realized, however, that there were two dark blots on his happiness⁠—the Dean and the Warden. The Dean shrugged his shoulders furiously every time Heraclius tried to convert him to the metempsychosic doctrine, and the Warden annoyed him with the most uncalled-for jests. These latter were quite intolerable. No sooner did the Doctor begin to expound his faith than the diabolical Warden instantly agreed with him; he pretended he was an adept listening to the words of a great apostle and he invented the most unlikely animal genealogies for every person of their mutual acquaintance. Thus he would say that Laboude, the Cathedral bellringer, from the time of his first transmigration could never have been anything but a melon, and that since then he had scarcely changed at all, being content to ring morning and evening the bell under which he had grown. He pretended that the Abbé Rosencroix, senior curate at St. Eulalie, had undoubtedly been a destructive crow, for he had preserved both its dress and its functions. Then, inverting the roles in the most deplorable manner, he would declare that M. Bocaille, the chemist, was only a degenerate ibis, since he was obliged to use an instrument to administer a remedy so simple that, according to Herodotus, the sacred bird used to give it to himself with no other help than that of his long beak. + 