The king of Czechoslovakia has put a golden circlet on my forehead and declared me peerless among men. Does this cause my ague to diminish when I awaken on a chilly morning? Do the fawning ministrations of the king of France, resplendent in his lynx ruff and soft boots of Spanish leather, with the circlet of Clovis on his narrow head, bring any relief to my dyspepsia, my morning sweats, my evening despair? What have I in fact achieved in my attempts to encompass the ever-expanding sphere of knowledge? What is knowledge to me, what is power, when my body shrivels daily, and my skin draws tight around my features, presaging the skull beneath the mottled flesh, which must in time come out?"

"This pursuit of knowledge is all very well. At one time, when I was a youth, ages, decades ago, I thought that all my heart's yearnings would be satisfied if I could capture that divine essence and distillation of knowledge that only the angels know. Yet how satisfying is knowledge, really? What would I not give for a sound digestion? I sit here and eat my daily gruel, since it is all my stomach can digest, while outside the rude red world bustles on, sweaty and unthinking! What is it to me, this piling up of knowledge upon knowledge, amassing a dungheap of wisdom in which I burrow like a beetle? Is this all there is? Would a man not be better offending it all? With this slender dagger, for example?"

And so saying he took up a thin-bladed, keenly pointed stiletto that had been presented to him by a student of the great Nicolas Flamel, who was now buried in Paris at the church of Saint-Jacques-la-Boucherie. Faust held it up to the flickering candlelight and watched the reflections play up and down its narrow blade. Turning it this way and that, he said, "Is it in vain, then, that I have learned the several arts of calcination, sublimation, condensation, and crystallization?