And the stuff’s got to come from somewhere. It can’t just renew itself on its own from age to age. Don’t misunderstand me: it’s conceivable, and even quite amusing. It would be a genuine perpetuum mobile, an energy constantly giving birth to itself, breathed into all living things and then liberating itself from them. But not only does that conjure up the idea of something present from the very beginning—an insubstantial ur-substance, so to speak—I don’t mean to call it GOD; that would be sacrilegious; the Creator stands on the side, so to speak, observing himself. But I mean, that’s exactly what argues against that substance arising from the void and becoming more and more and more and returning back out into the void . . . That would be nothing more or less than a blasphemous image of the Creator as a creative void. I don’t mean to say that. On the contrary, I consider God to be an extraordinarily efficient engineer, at least as far as his creation Nature is concerned. There, everything is most minutely interconnected and proceeds in constant circulation—yes, of course, help yourself to more cognac. Don’t wait for me to offer or even pour it out for you. That’s what it’s there for. Or would you rather have some calvados? It’s very good. I got it from Fégonsac.—No, thanks, no more for me . . . Where were we? So the observation—right?—that everything runs along in an eternal cycle, nothing gets lost, everything fulfills its purpose—all that led me to the idea that that’s also the case with the substance—if we can call it that—of our so-called soul. I mean, the Indians think of it that way in metempsychosis—the transmigration of souls—or rebirth, or whatever. For them it’s simple: the soul that becomes free at death remains homeless for a while (but as I said before, time plays no role at the level we’re talking about) until it slips into some other body, and I’m of the opinion that that’s what happens. Mind you, the new form it takes is not verifiable. Take Putzi Cottolenghi for example: once he’d croaked to annoy his family, he wouldn’t be reborn as his niece’s dachshund or anything like that. Or take my first wife, bless her soul! She wouldn’t come back as the operetta soubrette she always wanted to be. But instead, as substance, as a part of the universal inspiriting substance, whose amount would thus remain constant and plugged in to the eternal cycle. That explains a lot, for example, the fact that today, when there are millions more people on earth than in times past, much less of the substance seems to be in the individual than before. You need only compare some desert prophet with—let’s say—my overseer, who’s a very competent fellow. Of course he steals, they all do, but as a person he’s simply an oaf. And just in general, wherever you look, they’re a miserable lot nowadays. But naturally, that can lead to the incorrect hypothesis that because there were only a few people on earth back then, each individual automatically had received more human substance than the likes of us, so a Neanderthal, for example, must have been a much more valuable person.