“And yet,” the Abbé Chaperon would say, “if all men went in for this business, you must admit that society might be perfect. There would be no more misery. To be benevolent on your lines, a man must be a great philosopher. You raise yourself to your principles by reason—you are a social exception; now you need only be a Christian to be benevolent on ours. With you it is an effort; with us it is natural.”
“Which is as much as to say, Curé, that I think and you feel. That is all.”
Meanwhile, having reached the age of twelve, Ursule, whose womanly tact and shrewdness were brought into play by a superior education, and whose sense, now in its blossom, was enlightened by a religious spirit, fully understood that her godfather believed not in a future life, nor in the immortality of the soul, nor in Providence, nor in God. The doctor, pressed by her innocent questioning, found it impossible any longer to hide the terrible secret. Ursule’s naive consternation at first made him smile; but then, seeing that she was sometimes sad, he understood how great an affection this dejection revealed. Unqualified love has a horror of every kind of discord, even in things which have no connection with itself. The old man would sometimes lend himself, as to a caress, to the arguments of his adopted child, spoken in a gentle and tender voice, and the outcome of the most pure and ardent feeling. But believers and unbelievers speak two different languages, and cannot understand each other. The young girl in pleading the cause of God was hard upon her godfather, as a spoilt child is sometimes hard upon its mother. The curé gently reproved her, telling her that God reserved to Himself the power of humbling such proud spirits. The young girl answered the Abbé by saying that David slew Goliath. These religious differences, these sorrows of the child who longed to lead her guardian to God, were the only griefs of the home-life, so simple and so full, and hidden from the gaze of the inquisitive little town.
Ursule grew up and developed into the modest, Christianly-trained maiden whom Désiré had admired as she came out of church. The culture of the flowers in the garden, music, amusing her guardian, and all the attentions she paid him—for Ursule had relieved La Bougival by taking care of the old man—all filled up the hours, days, and months of this tranquil existence. For a year past, indeed, some little ailments of Ursule’s had made the doctor anxious; but they did not disturb him beyond making him watchful of her health. Meanwhile, however, the sagacious observer and experienced practitioner fancied he could discern that to her physical disorders there was some corresponding disturbance in her mind. He watched her with a mother’s eye, but seeing no one in their circle worthy to inspire her with love, he made himself easy.
Under these circumstances, just a month before the day when this drama had its beginning, an event occurred in the doctor’s intellectual life—one of those incidents which plough into the subsoil, so to speak, of our convictions, and turn up its very depths. But it will first be necessary to give a brief account of some facts of his medical career, which will also lend fresh interest to this narrative.
At the end of the eighteenth century science was as deeply rent by the apparition of Mesmer as art was by that of Gluck. After his rediscovery of magnetism, Mesmer came to France, whither from time immemorial inventors have resorted to find protection for their discoveries. France, thanks to the lucidity of her language, is as it were the trumpeter of the world.
“If homoeopathy gets to Paris, it is safe!” said Hahnemann.
“Go to France,” said Metternich to Gall, “and if they laugh at your ‘bumps,’ you are a made man.”
Mesmer, then, had his disciples and his antagonists, as ardent as the Piccinists against the Gluckists. Scientific France was stirred, and a serious debate was set on foot. Until judgment should be pronounced, the Faculty of Medicine, in a body, proscribed what they called Mesmer’s quackery, his tub, his conducting wires, and his theories. But it must be said that the German compromised his splendid discovery by preposterous pecuniary demands. Mesmer failed through unproven facts, through his ignorance of the part played in nature by imponderable fluids not as yet investigated, and through his inability to study all sides of a science which has three aspects. Magnetism has more applications; in Mesmer’s hands it was in relation to its future development what a principle is to results. But though the discoverer lacked genius, it is sad for human reason and for France to have to own that a science contemporaneous with the earliest civilization, cultivated in Egypt and Chaldea, in Greece and in India, met in Paris at the high tide of the eighteenth century with the same fate as the truth embodied in Galileo in the sixteenth; and that magnetism was put out of court by the twofold attainder of religious believers and of materialist philosophers, both equally alarmed. Magnetism, the favorite science of Jesus, and one of the powers conferred on the apostles, seems to have been as little recognized by the Church as by the followers of Jean-Jacques and Voltaire, of Locke and Condillac. Neither the Encyclopedia nor the priesthood could come to terms with this ancient human force which seemed to them so novel. The miracles of the convulsionnaires were smothered by the Church and by the indifference of the learned, in spite of the valuable works of
