MISTER MYSTERY RESPONDS

We did not hear from Rasputin until a few years later, when we learned that some Russian nobles had conspired against him, and although they finally managed to kill him, they had to employ the whole repertoire of murder methods, all of them in a single night. And even so, it seems that when they threw him into the cold waters of the Neva River, he was still alive and his death was caused by freezing. Of the "book fallen from the sky", we never knew anything else. Probably it has gone back to where it came from. Anyway, when I am under the open sky, I'm always looking up just in case. My physical constitution is not as robust as that of Papus, and I doubt that I survived the impact of such a voluminous book. And as for the rest of things, M. de Charlus has proposed himself to separate me from the tutelage of my Rosicrucian friends and to instruct me in his own wisdom, much more mundane and whose motto could be summarized in the word “Yippee!”. Although one day I trampled h...

One day, the trusted men of Papus (or G é rard Encausse in case his wife does not hear us) were called to an urgent meeting at the headquarters of the Rosicrucian Order on the Rue des Chartres. When I arrived I found a painter standing on a staircase, replacing the sign above the door's  lintel. Apparently, the Order had recently changed its name. It was no longer called "The Rosicrucian Order of the Temple" but "The Templar Order of the Rosicrucian." The painter was saying nasty things about the board of directors concerning its compulsive tendency to change the name of the Order. I left the irate man and entered the ancient stone building. There I met the Marquis de Guaita and Josephin P é ladan (who, by means of a sprinkling can, was watering the “ clod ” on his head). After a while, Papus burst into the room in a state of great stress, as we deduced from his attitude of beating his head against the walls. When, as a result of the blows, he collapsed in a fa...

When all the guests had left the castle, we were only my astral self, the Marquis (nicknamed the “Prince of Rosicrucians”), Papus (whose real name was Gérard Encausse, but he did not dare to publish it for fear that his wife discovered that he was involved in esoteric matters and report it to the authorities), and a weird monk plugged in by the Tsar of Russia and named Rasputin of whom we all distrusted, but whom we tolerated because he washed the dishes, swept, ironed the shirts, cooked, darned, and made the beds. (The Marquis had given holidays to all the domestic service in order to be free to dress up as a rabbit without being laughed at.) We kept our secret meetings in one of the towers of the castle in the light of candles. These consisted of the Marquis doing his imitation of a rabbit and the rest of us trying to hold our laughter, except Rasputin who never laughed and considered the imitation of the Marquis “a true masterpiece of idiocy”. The Marquis confessed to us that since ...