The languishing young men held spliced wax tapers that were like bits of rope; the coquettish hoydens had flowers stuck in their long hair; and the mischievous cherub-pages looked rapturously at the infant Jesus, who stood beside the Virgin and held out his hands in benediction.
Then there was a print of Breughel, engraved by Cock, "The wise and the foolish virgins": a little panel, cut in the middle by a corkscrew cloud which was flanked at each side by angels with their sleeves rolled up and their cheeks puffed out, sounding the trumpet, while in the middle of the cloud another angel, bizarre and sacerdotal, with his navel indicated beneath his languorously flowing robe, unrolled a banderole on which was written the verse of the Gospel, "_Ecce sponsus venit, exite obviam ei_." Beneath the cloud, at one side, sat the wise virgins, good Flemings, with their lighted lamps, and sang canticles as they turned the spinning wheel.

At the other side were the foolish virgins with their empty lamps.

Four joyous gossips were holding hands and dancing in a ring on the greensward, while the fifth played the bagpipe and beat time with her foot.

Above the cloud the five wise virgins, slender and ethereal now, naked and charming, brandished flaming tapers and mounted toward a Gothic church where Christ stood to welcome them; while on the other side the foolish virgins, imperfectly draped, beat vainly on a closed door with their dead torches.
The blessed naivete of the Primitives, the homely touches in the scenes of earth and of heaven! Durtal loved this old engraving.

He saw in it a union of the art of an Ostade purified and that of a Thierry Bouts.
Waiting for his grate, in which the charcoal was crackling and peeling and running like frying grease, to become red, he sat down in front of his desk and ran over his notes.
"Let's see," he said to himself, rolling a cigarette, "we had come to the time when that excellent Gilles de Rais begins the quest of the 'great work.' It is easy to figure what knowledge he possessed about the method of transmuting metals into gold.
"Alchemy was already highly developed a century before he was born.