"Why have you come to us?"  This was the first question she put to him when he stood before her.

"To live humbly in contemplation.  I have too long occupied myself with the search for glory.  I strove for understanding but the effort was too great.  My work has ignored the true spirit of existence -  which I now understand is to be the receptacle of God's will.

Looking into her face, he told himself that his search was complete.  He felt that she looked into his soul.  His French was not as fluent as he would like.  There was so much he wanted to say.  They talked first of her predicament.  People hated the truth, she said, and for this reason she was persecuted and forced to flee from place to place.

Her eyes hardly seemed to flicker as they watched him.  He felt himself become as small as one of his own specimens held in a glass tube, the subject of her unerring observation.  And as if his thoughts themselves were transparent.

The room was cold.  He could feel the chill of the stone flags strike up through the layers of wool in which his legs were bound.  The fire blazed in the fireplace but the flames seemed to burn coldly.

"You look doubtful."

"No, indeed, it's my desire to be your servant."

"How often have men said this to me."  There was a note of bitter recollection in her voice.  "And women too."

Many people had betrayed her.  He saw it in her rigid posture, in the clenched jaw.  The fire crackled and spat and the shadows wavered on the rough-hewn stone of the walls.  She seemed quiet and resigned but he decided she was not a woman to disappoint.  Her anger would be terrible.

"I asked Mr Witz to bring me some firewood - which he has done.  The wood though, as you see, is wet."

She showed him a stick or two of the wood which was green.   She turned a piece at arm's length as if it was some biblical serpent.  She complained about the filthy water in the well, the rain that leaked in and soaked the floor, the rotten window frames.

He did not know how to reply to this unexpected litany.  He wanted her to tell him how he should organise his life, what he should do with his manuscripts, with the drawings and notes for the history of the bees and other insects.

Finally, when she had exhausted the description of the ills of her present accommodation, she fell silent and stirred the fire morosely.  He plucked up the courage to mention his thoughts.

"You want me to praise your work."

"I value your opinion."

"I cannot say but that all this effort seems to be superfluous."

"I do it for the glory of God."

"God desires only that you should worship him."

She was becoming listless.   He watched the shadows encroach from the corners of the darkening room.

"You're more in touch with God than I am…"  This seemed to please her - to shake her from her lethargy.  "…therefore you are well-placed to advise me."

"Of what?"

"How I should proceed with my manuscripts."

"You are too consumed with thoughts of yourself, Monsieur Knyp.  Your soul must be passive before God.  The individual does not exist before God.  You must annihilate your will."

"I will try, I will strive for this."

"Life only has value if it is directed towards God, towards the fulfilment of his glory.  There should be no effort or desire for effort.  He is the fountain of all light.  He can teach you more than all the universities could teach you in a thousand years.  Your knowledge is meagre and shallow when compared to his."

"This is true.  The more I study living creatures, the more I am staggered by the intelligence that created them. 

"Speak to him.  As soon as you begin to take pleasure in these conversations, you will be spoiled for any other.  If you address him he will certainly answer you." 

Jan couldn't think what she meant by this but thought it best to keep quiet.  He tried to imagine the voice of God:  a stentorian rumble like thunder?  An echoing voice like the voice of bishop in a cathedral?  No voice he could think of seemed quite fitting. 

"I've often wondered how I might best be of service to God.  Perhaps, if people were able to appreciate the beauty of his creation…  Imagine, even the body of a flea, the least of all beasts …"

"Forget the fleas,  Monsieur Knyp.  Remember that, as you separate yourself from the creatures,"  she scrutinised him with her black eyes, "the closer you become to an understanding of God.  Remove these obstacles and his divine love will flow into your heart."

He began taking all the manuscripts out of the great mahogany cabinet where they were stored, bound up with scraps of black ribbon.  He laid them on the table in piles, reluctant to disturb the order he had imposed on them, the different categories he had devised to classify the different organisms he had examined.

The papers - scraps of curling vellum with his writing, the words scratched there, laboriously prised out of his aching skull.  He remembered when the ink had been wet and the bright fresh words had dripped onto the page from his pen.  He would have snuffed up their moisture.  It was all there: the glimmers he had tried to capture with the tendrils of thought reaching blindly into the patches of light.  He touched his own words.  Reading them he was shocked by their arrogance, now that he had been released from the cage of his ambition.  The dusty slivers of vellum slid against each other as certain phrases clanged in his mind:

"The evidence of God's design," he had written and laughed as he recalled the bellowing of the two-headed calf that was evidence of a darker truth.

There were the notes he had made on first looking through his lens at a drop of blood:

"The shapes are regular and beautifully oval, drifting in the translucent fluid that contains them…"

"All is vanity."  He repeated to himself,  "Vanity and petty ambition and striving for worldly fame and wealth."  When they were gone he would be cleansed.  It would be as if his evil obsessions had never existed.

The drawings were different.  The images shifted softly as he looked.  They were as real as their subjects had been and had something of their honesty.

His own honesty was doubtful to him and seemed like a thin membrane inside which the homunculus form of his thinking self was hunched, pulling at its lip and wrinkling a leathery brow, screwing up its eyes to glittering slits.  A hunger was grinding at the core of it.  He could have gorged on the drawings he had made, stuffing the pages into his mouth, like his sister crumpling the leaves of cabbages with her muscular jaws.  His fitful hands scrabbled amongst the papers as if they could still discover something: a jewel lost in the depths of wordiness or some unrefined gobbet of wisdom in the silty layers of parchment, not entirely crushed.

"Do you imagine you are special?"  Her searching eyes under the steely coils of hair had accused, "Dunkel has more faith than you.  At least, he does not question what he believes."

He was wounded at that,  she might have stuck him with one of her ivory hair pins; that the farting Dunkel, so humbly squirreling away his store of virtue, should be his equal in this woman's eyes.

"It's time to move beyond these things."  Her bony fingers were snatching at the sheaves of paper and folding them roughly.  "You must accept the simplicity of truth rather than trying to uncover a more complex version from within.  Truth cannot be entered, merely observed.  Can you not see that?  Can you not?"  she tapped out the words on the edge of her table, on the practical surface of oak.  "You cannot look into truth."

"But there is a vision, a revelation of sorts in my work."  He entreated and set his mouth.  This vision at times so crystalline, so perfect; his mouth was forming the words to explain:  "The intricacy of these forms, the workings of the smallest of bodies…"

The brass eyelids were clamped down as she smiled her disagreement with thin suffering lips.

"The symmetry of any being is remarkable.  It helps us to understand…"  his voice, or the shallow reverberation of his words, was a wasted trickle on the vast plain of her understanding.  She would not listen, but when he had stopped finally she opened her eyes:   the lustrous and profoundly black pupils were looking into him.

"Only you can do this."  Her words were distinct in the room's clammy silence

"Only I can decide."  He croaked and patted the piles he had constructed, but gently.

He knew she would be with him,  steadying his hand as he reached for the flint and struck the first vibrant sparks that flew into the stack of papers he had piled in the little brazier.

"It's just the product of a fevered brain, and fever, as you know, can only be treated with fire.  Understand that, and only that."

"But, so much time…"  He glimpsed a wing he had sketched:  a butterfly's wing, with each vein distinct like the spars of a window, and remembered the colours.  For a moment the wing lived again, touched by the gold and blue and the wisps of violet as the flames took it.  Jan grabbed at it to retrieve it but his hand was lashed by fire.

In a panic, he ran for the jug of water standing on the windowsill.  He could douse the flames still,  because it was his life curling up and sighing softly in the metal cage of the brazier - the hours and days he had spent in a delirium of discovery among those beautiful creatures.  He must, after all, save it.

The jug was full and heavy, the water shivered and tried to leap as he hefted it across the room.  His foot caught on a fold in the rug and he stumbled and fell with the jug.  The water spread darkly across the boards and fizzed as it met the edge of the hearth and flowed beneath the brazier where the heat caught it.

The whole mass of paper was aflame now.  Pieces caught and burned and flew upwards.

"There,"  he stroked the edges of the still warm brazier, tenderly.

"You will feel better,"  He could imagine her face; the eyes filling with the moisture of her approval for someone else's suffering,  "When you have finally admitted humility."

The final wisps of smoke stung his eyes.  "It is done,"  he murmured and his full throat contracted.

When all that was left was a heap of smouldering blackness, when the last fragile wings of ash had settled in the corners he felt a rush of gratitude to the woman who had made all this possible, who had finally released him from the need to contain and organise all this useless knowledge.

Because it seemed there was nothing else to do, he lay down on the narrow bed and closed his throbbing eyes.  The chirrup of a bird in the eaves and the distant shrill barking of a dog were the only sounds. Slowly he was dragged into the sea of sleep that swept up memories and scenes of long ago.  He dreamt of his childish fingers fumbling with a stick of charcoal and daubing the page, the stumps of insect legs that he tried to draw.  He saw his mother's hands with their chipped and broken nails wiping away the smudges of charcoal and her laughing face while he tried to draw again.  He was reading in his dream, and a scrabbling sound was disturbing him that came from somewhere out of sight.  It irritated him by its tiny fractious scratching.  He peered into the tangled foliage that lay beneath and finally he saw it:  a tiny brown wren, picking insects from the glossy leaves.  But he could not read.  He thought that if he could, he would discover something, but the bird would not let him and fluttered and pecked until he woke. 

And remembered his loss.