The Last

by Eliphas Lévi, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

All magic is accomplished by four words, and I have set them on the four faces of the Sphinx so that no one need forget them: to know, to dare, to will, to keep silence. I have taught them to countesses at twenty francs the lesson. I have explained them in three volumes, with plates. In my whole life I have never once performed the fourth, and I learned what it is in the winter of 1862 from a cobbler named Jérôme Aubertin, who had never heard of the Sphinx and would have charged it thirty sous for a heel.

His shop was beneath my room in the rue du Cherche-Midi, and the floor between us was so thin that I knew his day better than my own. At six the shutters. At a quarter past, the first blows, two light and one heavy, which is a man setting a nail in a heel. Then the long silence of the awl, which you cannot hear, and the whisper of the waxed thread drawn through, which you can, if you lie with your ear to the boards as I did on the mornings when I had no lesson and no money for a fire. The smell came up too: cobbler's wax, which is pitch and resin and tallow, and the sour, honest stink of oak-bark leather in the tub. I have burned frankincense from Aden in a brass chafing-dish before the image of the Tetragrammaton. I have never smelt anything that so convinced me the visible world is the work of an invisible one as that tub of soaking sole-leather under my floor.

He was a man of about fifty, short, wide in the shoulder, with the left thumb grooved where the thread had cut it ten thousand times. He did not speak. That is to say, he spoke as much as his trade required: the price, the day, bonjour, bonsoir. He called me Monsieur l'abbé, because the concierge had told him that I had once worn the cassock, and he gave the title neither more nor less weight than he gave the price of a heel.

One day of the year he spoke. That was the twenty-fifth of October, the feast of Saint Crispin, the patron of his trade, when every cobbler in Paris shuts his shutters and drinks. Aubertin shut his and drank alone. In the evening of my first Saint Crispin in that house he climbed the stairs with what was left of a litre of red wine and knocked on my door, and I gave him the only chair, and he told me, in perhaps forty words, that his wife had gone out of that shop on Saint Crispin's day in the year 1843. He had made her wedding boots on her own last, he said, and she had walked out of the shop in them, and that was eighteen years. Then he finished the wine, said bonsoir, Monsieur l'abbé, and went down. He never spoke of her again, and on the twenty-sixth he charged me thirty sous for a heel as on any other day.

I also had a wife. She also went. I have spoken of her to every editor in Paris, to two magistrates, to the Abbé who confessed me at Saint-Sulpice when I was still in the habit of confession, and to a great many women at supper who were sorry for me for the length of the soup. I have explained her. I have argued her case and mine to anyone who would sit still for it. And she is no more present to me for all that talk than a coin is present in a purse that has been emptied on the counter. Aubertin had forty words and a litre of wine once a year, and I came to believe in that room, watching his hands on the glass, that his wife was more present in that shop than mine had ever been in any room I had lived in since.

I must say plainly what I mean by present, because the word has been ruined by the table-turners.

There exists a universal agent, a light that is more than light, a fluid more than a fluid, which bathes all things and receives the impressions of all things. The Kabbalists represent it as the garment of the soul. I have called it the Astral Light, and I have been mocked for calling it so by men who believe in electricity without having seen it. This light carries every image that has ever been formed with intention: the gesture of the murderer and the gesture of the mother, the thought of the miser over his gold and of the saint over his wound. It is because it carries everything that it deceives: the untrained visionary who opens himself to it receives a flood, and calls the flood revelation, and ends at Charenton. What masters the light is the will, and I do not mean by will the obstinacy of a mule or the resolution of a man who has given up absinthe until Tuesday. I mean the faculty that, trained by long repetition and directed by a word, impresses a form upon the great agent so that the form endures.

Aubertin had sewn the same welt, at the same tight interval, every working day for thirty-five years. I have seen adepts with less discipline than that thumb. Whatever he sewed with his whole will stayed sewn, in the leather and in the light. And on the back shelf of his shop, among the lasts of the dead and the departed, where the dust lay so thick that it had the colour of felt, there was a pair of small beech lasts with C. A. burnt into the heel of each, and he had not thrown them on the stove in eighteen winters, though he had burnt other lasts when the wood ran short.

That is what I mean by present.

---

In February the snow came and turned to slush, and the slush came through the soles of half the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and Aubertin worked by lamplight until ten. I had one pair of shoes. On the morning of which I write the left heel had gone down to the nails, and I sat on the stool in his shop with one shoe on and the other foot in its stocking on the rung, waiting, a professor of the high science in darned wool, while he cut a new lift from the butt.

The bell rang and a girl came in out of the slush.

She was perhaps seventeen, tall, in a brown stuff dress and a grey shawl, with a laundress's red hands, and on her feet a pair of side-laced bottines so far gone that the uppers had parted from the welt at both toes and she had tied them round with string. She stamped on the mat. She looked at my stocking and then decided not to look at me.

"Monsieur Aubertin?"

He put down the knife. "Mademoiselle."

"I want boots made. Not mended. Made." She put a hand into her shawl and brought out a twist of paper and did not open it. "My mother has saved since All Saints. They're for Easter. I'll be eighteen at Easter."

"Who sent you?"

"My mother. Madame Mauduit, at the Batignolles. She says you made her boots once, before I was born, and nobody else in Paris sews a welt so close." The girl said this as one repeats a lesson, and a little impatiently, as if she had been told it a great many times and did not see why a welt should matter so much as all that, when there were cobblers in the Batignolles.

Aubertin said nothing for a moment. Then he said, "Sit, mademoiselle," and took from the drawer the paper and the pencil and the measuring-stick, and knelt on the floor in front of her.

I have watched a great many operations performed by men who believed themselves magicians, and I have performed a few, and I tell you that I never saw a thing done with such exactness of attention as that measure. He unknotted the string from her boots himself and drew them off. He set her stockinged foot on the paper and ran the pencil round it, holding the point upright so that it would not creep in under the arch. He laid the stick along the sole and slid the block to her toe and read it. Then he took a strip of paper and passed it round the ball of her foot, and nicked it with his knife where the end met; and round the waist, and nicked it; and round the instep. As he passed it round the heel and the instep together, the girl said again, for no reason but to fill the quiet, that her mother had told her nobody sewed a welt so close; and the knife stopped above the paper for as long as it takes to say a short prayer. Then it made the nick, exactly where the nick should be.

"Two weeks," he said, standing up. "Eighteen francs."

She opened the twist of paper and counted out eight francs in silver as earnest, and he wrote her name in his book, Mlle Mauduit, without asking how it was spelt, and she tied her ruined boots back on with the string and went out into the slush. The bell rang behind her.

He went back to my heel. He finished it, which is to say he pared it, and pegged it, and set the nails, two light and one heavy, and blacked the edge, and handed me my shoe. Then he went to the back shelf and lifted down the pair of beech lasts marked C. A. and blew the dust from them, and the dust went up into the lamplight and hung there. He set the lasts on the bench beside the girl's paper, and laid the stick on the paper, and stood looking at the three things together.

Now I must confess what I did, because it is the whole of the matter.

For thirty years I have found numbers in things. I have found the twenty-two letters in the twenty-two cards of the Tarot, and I set them there myself, and I know it, and I do not repent of it. I once found the number of the Beast in a hatter's bill, for amusement, at a supper, and a lady screamed. It is my trade to count. I sat on the stool with my mended shoe in my lap, and I counted, as I could not help counting. His wife went out of that door on the feast of Saint Crispin in 1843. This girl would be eighteen at Easter: Easter of 1862. So she was born in the spring of 1844. So she was begun in the summer of 1843. And in the summer of 1843 Madame Aubertin had not yet gone out of the door.

It was the first sum of my life that I did not wish to have the answer to, and the answer was there, as answers are, whether one wishes it or no.

I said, "Aubertin—"

He looked up from the lasts. "Your shoe, Monsieur l'abbé. Put it on. The floor is cold."

That was all. He did not say it unkindly. He said it as he said the price of a heel, and I understood that I had been told, as plainly as a man can be told, that there was nothing in that shop for my mouth to do.

---

He worked for her at night. I knew it through the floor. In the day there were the ordinary blows, the ordinary customers, the porters' clogs and the clerks' half-boots; but after he had put up the shutters and eaten his soup there began another work, and I lay in the dark and learned it by ear.

First the rasp, for a long while, two nights of it. A last is a foot of wood, and a woman's foot at twenty is not her daughter's at seventeen. The girl's foot was longer than her mother's, I suppose, and narrower at the heel, and a little wider at the ball, as the young are who carry baskets. So he was taking the old last down where it was too full, with the rasp; and on the third night I heard the quick small taps of the tack-hammer, which meant he was building it up where it was too lean, with thin pieces of skived leather fastened to the wood, as cobblers do. He was making the mother's last into the daughter's. There is no other way to say it, and he would not have said it at all.

On the fourth night he cut the uppers. You cannot hear a knife go through calfskin, but you can hear the silence of a man who is cutting, and you can hear him go to the hook by the window where the best skins hang, and take one down. I knew which skin. It was a black calf, French-tanned, smooth as the inside of a wrist, and he had refused it to a notary's wife at Christmas, saying it was promised. Eighteen francs does not buy that skin. Eighteen francs barely buys the thread and the sole-leather and the labour of a man who is not starving. I lay and did my sums again, and the sums said that he was making a gift and charging for it, so that nobody should have to say thank you.

Then for a week the awl. You cannot hear an awl. You can hear the thread.

I did not sleep well that week, and on the ninth night I got up and lit my candle and did what I am made to do. I wrote a letter. Madame, I wrote, you do not know me, but I live above the shop of a man whom you know. I wrote three pages. I wrote them well; I have written for the newspapers and been imprisoned for it twice, and I know how to make a sentence that cannot be refused. I told her what he had done with the rasp and the tack-hammer and the black calf. I told her that a man may keep silence for eighteen years and still be waiting. I told her where the girl's last now hung, and that he had not burnt it, and what that meant. I told her, God forgive me, about the Astral Light.

When I had finished I read it over by the candle, and it was very fine, and it was exactly what I would have said to my own wife if she had ever let me in at the door again; and I understood, reading it, that it would undo the work beneath me as surely as if I had gone down the stairs with a knife and cut the stitches.

A force that is spoken is a force spent. I have written that sentence, or one very like it, and I have quoted it to countesses. A man who speaks of his operation before it is complete opens a hole in the vessel, and what he has gathered runs out of it into the general light, where it is mixed with everything and belongs to nobody. Aubertin had not read it. He had simply never once, in eighteen years, opened the hole. Everything he had not said to that woman was down there on the bench, in the leather, in the close welt that nobody else in Paris could sew, in the boots that her daughter would walk to Easter mass in. And I, who have explained this to half the salons on the left bank, was sitting up at two in the morning with three pages in my hand, ready to pour it all out into the street for the pleasure of having been the one to say it.

I put the letter into the stove. There was no fire, and I had to burn it with the candle, a page at a time, and the ash went everywhere. Below me the thread went through, and was drawn tight, and went through.

---

She came for them on a Saturday at the beginning of March, at about four, when the light was going. I was in the shop, because I had contrived to be. I am not a saint.

Her mother did not come in. I saw her through the window: a woman of about forty in a grey shawl, standing under the awning of the wine-shop across the street, with her hands folded in front of her, not looking at the shop and not looking away from it. She did not cross. Aubertin, at his bench, lifted his head once to the window, for as long as it took the knife to stop above the paper on the day of the measure; then he lowered it and took the boots down from the shelf and set them on the counter.

They were very plain. That is the thing I remember: there was no ornament on them at all, no brass, no fancy stitching on the toe-cap, nothing that would have made a notary's wife look twice. Black calf, side-laced, a low heel, the welt so close that the sole seemed to have grown from the upper rather than been sewn to it. The girl sat on the stool where I had sat in my stocking, and unknotted the string from her old ones for the last time, and put her feet into the new, and laced them, and stood.

She walked to the door and back. She frowned down at them, as the young frown when a thing is good and they do not know yet what to do with the fact.

"They don't pinch anywhere," she said.

"They will at Easter," said Aubertin. "New boots always do, at mass. Then they stop."

She laughed at that. She counted out the ten francs that were owing, in silver and in sous, on the counter, and he counted them after her and swept them into the drawer, and wrote payé in his book beside her name. She took up the old boots by their string. At the door she turned and said, "My mother says thank you, monsieur."

"Bonsoir, mademoiselle," said Aubertin.

The bell rang. She went across the slush, and I heard her heels on the cobbles, new and hard and a little too loud, as new heels are. The woman under the awning took her arm, and they went away together up the street towards the Croix-Rouge without looking back, and the dusk had them before the corner.

Aubertin did not go to the door. He took the pair of beech lasts from the bench, the ones that had been marked C. A. and were now built up with leather into a shape that was no longer quite the mother's, and he did not put them back on the dusty shelf among the dead and the departed. He hung them on the nail nearest his bench, where he keeps the lasts of customers who come back.

Then he reached under the counter and brought out my right shoe, which had gone down at the heel in its turn and which I had left with him that morning, and turned it over to show me the heel.

"Thirty sous, Monsieur l'abbé."

I put the thirty sous down on the bench beside the lasts, and I went up the stairs without a word, and before I had reached the landing he had begun on the next heel, two light and one heavy; and I stood on the landing in the dark and counted the blows through the boards, and for once in my life I lost count.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (17 October 2026), ab Eliphā Lēvī per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Eliphas Lévi, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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