Minoret, grown young again, did not sleep. He went to call on the old physicians of his acquaintance, and asked them if the world were turned upside down, if there were still a School of Medicine, and if the four Faculties still existed. The doctors reassured him by telling him that the old spirit of resistance still survived; only, instead of persecuting the new science, the Academies of Medicine and of Sciences roared with laughter, and classed magnetic demonstrations with the tricks of Comus, Comte, and Bosco, as jugglery, sleight-of-hand, and what is known as amusing physics.
These speeches did not hinder Minoret from going to the rendezvous appointed by old Bouvard. After forty-four years of alienation the antagonists met again under a courtyard gate in the Rue St. Honoré.
Frenchmen live in too constant a change to hate each other very long. In Paris, especially, events expand space and make life so wide—in politics, in science, and in literature—that men cannot fail to find countries in it to conquer where their demands find room to dwell and rule. Hatred requires so many forces always in arms that those who mean to hate persistently begin with a good supply. And then, only bodies of men can bear it in mind. At the end of forty-four years Robespierre and Danton would fall on each other’s neck.
Neither of the two doctors, however, offered to shake hands. Bouvard was the first to say to Minoret (with the familiar tu of French good-fellowship):
“You are looking very well.”
“Yes, not so badly; and you?” said Minoret, the ice being broken.
“I—as you see me.”
“Has magnetism kept you from dying?” asked Minoret in a bantering tone, but not bitterly.
“No; but it has almost kept me from living.”
“You are not rich then?” said Minoret.
“Rich!” said Bouvard.
“Well, but I am rich!” cried Minoret.
“It is not your fortune, but your conviction, that I aim at. —Come,” replied Bouvard.
“Obstinate fellow!” exclaimed Minoret.
The believer in Mesmer led his incredulous friend into a dark stairway, and made him mount cautiously to the fourth floor.
At this time there was in Paris an extraordinary man, endowed by faith with tremendous powers, and a master of magnetic forces in every form of their application. Not only did this Great Unknown, who is still living, cure unaided, and at any distance, the most painful and inveterate diseases—cure them suddenly and radically, as of old did the Redeemer of man—but he also could produce at any moment the most curious phenomena of somnambulism by quelling the most refractory wills. The countenance of the Unknown, who, like Swedenborg, declares himself to be commissioned by God and in communion with the angels, is that of a lion; it is radiant with concentrated and irresistible energy. His features, of a singular cast, have a terrible and overwhelming power; his voice, coming from the depths of his being, seems charged with magnetic fluid, and enters the listener by every pore.
Disgusted with the ingratitude of the public after thousands of cures, he had thrown himself into unapproachable solitude, voluntary annihilation. His all-powerful hand, which has restored dying daughters to their mothers, fathers to their weeping children, adored mistresses to lovers crazed with love; which has cured the sick when physicians have given them over, and caused thanksgivings to be sung in the synagogue, in the conventicle, and in the church, by priests of different creeds, all brought to the same God by the same miracle; which has mitigated the agony of death to those for whom life was no longer possible—that sovereign hand, the sun of life which dazzled the closed eyes of the sleepwalker, he now would not lift to restore the heir of a kingdom to a queen. Wrapped in the memory of the good he has done as in a luminous shroud he has shut his door on the world, and dwells in the skies.
But, in the early days of his reign, almost startled by his own powers, this man, whose disinterestedness was as great as his influence, allowed a few inquirers to witness his miracles. The rumor of his fame, which had been immense, and which might revive any day, aroused Doctor Bouvard on the brink of the tomb. The persecuted believer in Mesmer could at last behold the most brilliant manifestation of the science he cherished, like a treasure, in his heart. The old man’s misfortunes had touched the Great Unknown, who granted him certain privileges. So Bouvard, as they climbed the stairs, took his old adversary’s banter with malicious satisfaction. He made no reply but “You will see, you will see,” with the little tosses of the head that mark a man sure of his case.
The two doctors entered a suite of rooms of the plainest simplicity. Bouvard went to speak with the master for a moment in a bedroom adjoining the drawing-room, where he left Minoret, whose distrust was now aroused. But Bouvard immediately came back, and led him into the bedroom, where he found the famous Swedenborgian with a woman seated in an armchair. The woman did not rise, and seemed not to observe the arrival of the two old men.
“What, no tub?” said Minoret, with a smile.
“Nothing but the power of God,” gravely replied the Swedenborgian, whom Minoret supposed to be a man of about fifty.
The three men sat down, and the stranger made conversation. They spoke of the weather and indifferent matters, to old Minoret’s great surprise; he fancied he was being fooled. The Swedenborgian questioned his visitor as to his scientific views, and was evidently taking time to study him.
“You have come here out of pure curiosity, monsieur,” he said at length. “I am not in the habit of prostituting a power which, it is my full conviction, emanates from God; if I made a frivolous or evil use of
