“I have lived some forty generations of man.”
“Being long-lived, I can be patient. I carry your fate – ay, that of the world in the hollow of my hand. I will not open it to let out the lightnings till I see fit. Let us come down from these sublime hights and walk on the earth.
“Gentlemen, I say with simplicity and full belief, it is not yet time. The King now reigning is the last reflection of the glory of the Great Louis who dazzles still enough to pale your ineffectual fires. A King, he will die royally: of an insolent race but pure-bred. Slay him and that will happen which befel Charles First of England: his executioners will bow to him and courtiers will kiss the ax which lops off his head. You know that England was in too much of a hurry. It is true that Charles Stuart died on the scaffold but the block was a stepping-stone for his son to reach the throne and he died on it.”
“Wait, wait, brothers, for the times are becoming propitious.
“We are sworn to destroy the lilies but we must root them up – not a stalk must be left. But the breath of fate is going to shrivel royalty up to nothing. Draw nearer and hear this – the Dauphiness, though a year wedded – ”
“Well?” asked the chiefs with anxiety.
“She is still as when she came from her mother’s land.”
An ominous murmur, so full of hatred and revengeful triumph as to make all Kings flee, escaped like a blast of hell from the lips of this narrow circle of six heads almost touching, but towered over by Balsamo’s bending down from the stage.
“In this state of things,” he pursued, “two suppositions are presented. The race will die out and our friends will have no difficulties, combats or troubles. As happens every time three Kings succeed, the Dauphin, Provence and Artois will reign but die without posterity – it is the law of destiny.
“The other hypothesis is that the Dauphiness will yet bear children. That is the trap into which our enemies will rush in the belief that we will fall into it. We will rejoice when she is a mother, just like them; for we possess a dread secret, comprising crimes which no power, prestige or efforts can counteract. We can easily make out that the heir which she gives the throne is illegitimate and the more fecund she may be, the worse will appear her conduct.
“This is why, my brothers, that I wait; judging it useless as yet to unchain popular passions to be employed efficaciously when the right time comes.
“Now, brothers, you know how I have employed this year. You see the extent of my mines. Be persuaded that we shall succeed, but with the genius and courage of some, who are the eyes and the brain; with the labor and perseverance of others, who represent the arms; and with the faith and devotedness of others still, who are the heart.
“Be penetrated with the necessity of blind obedience which makes the Grand Copt himself stand ready to be immolated to the will of the Order’s statutes when the day comes.
“There is a good act yet to do, and an evil to point out.
“The great author who came to us this evening and would have joined us but for the stormy behavior of one of our brothers who alarmed the sensitive spirit – he was right as against us and I am sorry one of the profane was in the right before a majority of our society, who know the ritual badly and our aims not at all. Triumphing with the sophisms of his works over our Order’s truths, he represents a vice which I shall extirpate with fire and sword, unless it can be done with persuasion, as I hope. The self-conceit of one of our brothers showed itself vilely. He placed us secondary in the argument. I trust that no such fault will again be committed or else I shall have recourse to discipline.
“Now, brothers, propagate the faith with mildness and persuasion. Insinuate rather than impose, and do not try to make truths enter with hammer and ax blows like the torturers who use wedge and sledge. Remember that we shall be acknowledged great only after having proved that we have done good, and that will only happen when we shall appear better than those round us. Remember, too, that the good are nothing without science, art and faith; nothing beside those whom the Divine Architect has stamped with a peculiar seal to command men and rule an empire.
“Brothers, the meeting adjourns.”
He put on his hat and wrapped himself in his mantle. Each freemason went out in his turn, alone and silent so as not to awaken suspicion. The last with the Supreme Master was the Surgeon Marat.
Very pale, he humbly approached him for he knew the terrible speaker’s power was unlimited.
“Master, did I commit a fault?” he inquired.
“A great one, and all the worse as you are not conscious that you did so,” replied the man of mystery.
“I confess it; not only ignorant, but I thought I spoke becomingly.”
“Pride – destructive demon! men hunt for fever in the veins and search for the cancer in the vitals, but they let pride shoot up such roots deeply in their heart as never to be able to wrench them out.”
“You have a very poor opinion of me, master,” returned Marat. “Am I so paltry a fellow that I am not to be counted among my equals? Have I culled the fruit of the tree of knowledge so clumsily that I am incapable of saying a word without being taxed with ignorance? Am I so lukewarm a member that my conviction is suspected? Were this all so, still I exist by reason of my devotion to the masses.”
“Brother, it is because the spirit of evil contends in you with that of good and seems to me to promise to overpower it one day, that I undertake to correct you. If I succeed it will be in one hour, unless pride has the upperhand of all your other passions.”
“Master, make an appointment which I will keep.”
“I will call on you.”
“Mind what you promise. I am living in a garret in Cordelier’ Street. A garret, mark you, while you – ” he emphasized the word with an affectation of proud simplicity.
“While I – ”
“While, so they say, you live in a palace.”
The master shrugged his shoulders as a giant might do when jeered at by a dwarf.
“I will call upon you in your garret in the morning.”
“I go to the dissection hall at daybreak and then to the hospital.”
“That will suit me very well; I should have suggested it if you had not said it.”
“You understand – early – I do not sleep much.”
“And I never sleep at peep of day,” said Balsamo.
Upon this they separated, as they had reached the street door, dark and lonely on their going forth as it had been noisy and lively when they went in.
CHAPTER XIX
BODY AND SOUL
BALSAMO was punctual and found, at six o’clock, Marat and his servant, a woman of all work, decking up the room with flowers in a vase in honor of the visitor. At sight of the master, the surgeon blushed more plainly than was becoming in a stoic.
“Where are we first going?” asked Balsamo when they got down to the street door.
“To Surgeon’ Hall,” was the reply. “I have selected a corpse there, a subject which died of acute meningitis; I have to make some observations on the brain and do not wish my colleagues to cut it up before I do.”
“Let us to the hall, then.”
“It is only a couple of steps; besides, you need not go in; you might wait for me at the door.”
“On the contrary, I want to go in with you and have your opinion on the subject, since it is a dead body.”
“Take care,” said Marat; “For I am an expert anatomist and have the advantage of you there.”
“Pride, more pride,” muttered the Italian.
“What is that?”
“I say that we shall see about that. Let us enter.”
Balsamo followed him without shrinking into the amphitheatre, on Hautefeuille Street. On a marble slab in the long, narrow hall were two corpses, a man’s and a woman’s. She had died young: he was old and bald; a wornout sheet veiled their bodies but half exposed their faces.
Side by side on the chilly bed, they might never have met in life and if their souls could see them now, they would have been mutually surprised at the neighborhood.
Marat pulled off the shroud of coarse linen from the two unfortunates equalised by death under the surgeon’s knife. They were nude.
“Is not the sight repugnant to you?” asked Marat with his usual braggadocia.
“It makes me sad,” replied the other.
“From not being habituated to it,” said the dissector. “I see the thing daily and I feel neither sadness nor dislike. We surgical practitioners have to live with the lifeless and we do not on their account interrupt any of the functions of our life.”
“It is a sad privilege of your profession.”
“And why should I feel in the matter? Against sadness, I have reflection; against the other thing, habit. What is to frighten me in a corpse, a statue of flesh instead of stone?”
“As you say, in a corpse there is nothing, while in the living body there is – ”
“Motion,” replied Marat loftily.
“You have not spoken of the soul.”
“I have never come across it when I searched with my scalpel.”
“Because you searched the dead only.”
“Oh, I have probed living bodies.”
“But have met nothing more than in dead ones?”
“Yes, pain; you don’t call that the soul, do you?”
“Do you not believe in the soul?”
“I believe in it but I may call it the Moving Power, if I like.”
“Very well; all I ask is if you believe in the soul; it makes me happy to think so.”
“Stop an instant, master,” interrupted Marat with his viper-like smile: “let us come to an understanding and not exaggerate; we surgical operators are rather materialists.”
“These bodies are quite cold,” mused Balsamo aloud, “and this woman was good-looking. A fine soul must have dwelt in that fine temple.”
“There was the mistake – it was a vile blade of metal in that showy scabbard. This body, master, is that of a drab who was taken from the Magdalen Prison of St. Lazare where she died of brain fever, to the Main Hospital. Her story is very scandalous and long. If you call her moving impulse a soul, you do ours wrong.”
“The soul might have been healed and it was lost, because no physician for the soul came along.”
“Alas, master, this is another of your theories. Only for bodies are there medicines,” sneered Marat with a bitter laugh. “You use words which are a reflection of a part of ‘Macbeth,’ and it makes you smile. Who can minister to a mind diseased? Shakespeare calls your ‘sou’ the mind.”
“No, you are wrong, and you do not know why I smile. For the moment we are to conclude that these earthly vessels are empty?”
“And senseless,” went on Marat, raising the head of the woman and letting it fall down on the slab with a bang, without the remains shuddering or moving.
“Very well: let us go to the hospital now,” said Balsamo.
“Not until I have cut off the head and put it by, as this coveted head is the seat of a curious malady.”
He opened his instrument-case, took out a bistory, and picked up in a corner a mallet spotted with blood. With a skilled hand he traced a circular incision separating all the flesh and neck muscles. Cleaving to the spine, he thrust his steel between two joints and gave with the maul a sharp, forcible rap. The head rolled on the table, and bounced to the ground. Marat was obliged to pick it up with his moistened hands. Balsamo turned his head not to fill the operator with too much delight.
“One of these days,” said the latter, thinking he had caught his superior in a weak moment, “some philanthropist who ponders over death as I do over life will invent a machine to chop off the head to bring about instantaneous extinction of the vital spark, which is not done by any means of execution now in practice. The rack, the garrote the rope, these are all methods of torture appertaining to barbarous peoples and not to the civilized. An enlightened nation like France ought to punish and not revenge: for the society which racks, strangles and decapitates by the sword inflicts punishment by the pain besides that of death alone, the culprit’s portion. This is overdoing the penalty by half, I think.”
“It is my opinion, too. What idea do you have of such an instrument?”
“A machine, cold and emotionless as the Law itself; the man charged with the inflection is affected by the sight of the criminal in his own likeness; and he misses his stroke, as at the beheading of Chalais and of the Duke of Monmouth. A machine would not do that, say, a wooden arm which brought down an ax on the neck.”
“I have seen something of the kind in operation, the Maiden, it is called in Scotland, and the Mannaja, in Italy. But I have also seen the decapitated criminals rise without their heads, from the seat on which they were placed, and stagger off a dozen paces. I have picked up such heads, by the hair, as you just did that one which tumbled off the table, and when I uttered in the ear the name with which it was baptized, I saw the eyes open to see who called and showed that still on the earth it had quitted one could cry after what was passing from time to eternity.”
“Merely a nervous movement.”
“Are not the nerves the organs of sense? I conclude that it would be better for man, instead of seeking a machine to kill without pain for punishment, he had better seek the way to punish without killing. The society that discovers that will be the best and most enlightened.”
“Another Utopia!” exclaimed Marat.
“Perhaps you are right, this once,” responded Balsamo. “It is time that will enlighten us.”
Marat wrapped up the female head in his handkerchief which he tied by the four corners in a knot.
“In this way, I am sure that my colleagues will not rob me of my head,” he said.
Walking side by side the dreamer and the practitioner went to the great Hospital.
“You cut that head off coldly and skillfully,” said the former. “Have you less emotion when dealing with the quick? Does suffering affect you less than insensibility? Are you more pitiless with living bodies than the dead?”
“No, for it would be a fault, as in an executioner to let himself feel anything. A man would die from being miscut in the limb as surely as though his head were struck off. A good surgeon ought to operate with his hand and not his heart, though he knows in his heart that he is going to give years of life and happiness for the second’s suffering. That is the golden lining to our profession.”
“Yes; but in the living, I hope you meet with the soul?”
“Yes, if you hold that the soul is the moving impulse – the sensitiveness; that I do meet, and it is very troublesome sometimes for it kills more patients than my scalpel.”
Guided by Marat, who would not put aside his ghastly burden, Balsamo was introduced into the operation ward, crowded with the chief surgeon and the students.
The aids brought in a young man, knocked down the previous week by a heavy wagon which had crushed his foot. A hasty operation at that time had not sufficed; mortification had spread and amputation of the leg was necessary. Stretched on the bed of anguish, the poor fellow looked with a terror which would have melted tigers, on the band of eager men who waited for the time of his martyrdom, his death perchance, to study the science of life – the marvellous phenomenon which conceals the gloomy one of death. He seemed to sue from the surgeon and assistants some smile of comfort, but he met indifference on all sides, steel in every eye.
A remnant of courage and manly pride kept him mute, reserving all to try to check the screams which agony would tear from him.
Still, when he felt the kindly heavy hand of the porter on his shoulder, and the aid's arms interlace him like serpents, and heard the operator’s voice saying “Keep up your pluck my brave man!” he ventured to break the stillness by asking in a plaintive tone:
“You are not going to hurt me much?”
“Not at all; be quiet,” replied Marat, with a false smile which might seem sweet to the sufferer, but was ironical to Balsamo, and noting that the latter had seen through him, the young surgeon whispered to him:
“It is a dreadful operation. The bone is splintered and sensitive so as to make any one pity him. He will die of the pain, not the injury; that will make his soul want to fly away.”
“Why operate on him – why not let him die tranquilly?”
“Because it is a surgeon’s duty to attempt a cure when it is impossible.”
“But you say that he will suffer dreadfully on account of his having a soul too tender for his frame? then, why not operate on the soul so that the tranquillity of the one will be the salvation of the other?”
“Just what I have done,” replied Marat, while the patient was tied down. “By my words, I spoke to the soul – to his sensitiveness, what made the Greek philosopher say, ‘Pain, thou art no ill.’ I told him he would not feel much pain, and it is the business of his soul not to feel any. That is the only remedy known up to the present. As for the questions of the soul – lies! why is this deuce of a soul clamped to the body? When I knocked this head off a spell ago, the body said nothing. Yet that was a grave operation enough. But the movement had ceased, sensitiveness was no more and the soul had fled, as you spiritualists say. That is why the head and the body which I severed, made no remonstrance to me. But the body of this unhappy fellow with the soul still in, will be yelling awfully in a little while. Stop up your ears closely, master. For you are sensitive, and your theory will be killed by the shock, until the day when your theory can separate the soul from the body.”
“You believe such separation will never come?” said Balsamo.
“Try, for this is a capital opening.”
“I will; this young man interests me and I do not want him to feel the pain.”
“You are a leader of men,” said Marat, “but you are not a heavenly being, and you cannot prevent the lad from suffering.”
“If he should not suffer, would his recovery be sure?”
“It would be likely, but not sure.”
Balsamo cast an inexpressible look of triumph on the speaker and placing himself before the patient, whose frightened and terror-filled eyes he caught, he said: “Sleep!” not with the mouth solely but with look, will, all the heat of his blood and the fluid electricity in his system.
At this instant the chief surgeon was beginning to feel the injured thigh and point out to the pupils the extent of the ail.
But at this command from the mesmerist, the young man, who had been raised by an assistant, swung a little and let his head sink, while his eyes closed.
“He feels bad,” said Marat; “he loses consciousness.”
“Nay, he sleeps.”
Everybody looked at this stranger whom they took for a lunatic.
Over Marat’s lips flitted a smile of incredulity.
“Does a man usually speak in a swoon?” asked Balsamo. “Question him and he will answer you.”
“I say, young man,” shouted Marat.
“No, there is no need for you to halloo at him,” said Balsamo, “he will hear you in your ordinary voice.”
“Give us an idea what you are doing?”
“I was told to sleep, and I am sleeping,” replied the patient, in a perfectly unruffled voice strongly contrasting with that heard from him shortly before.
All the bystanders stared at one another.
“Now, untie him,” said Balsamo.
“No, you must not do that,” remonstrated the head surgeon, “the operation would be spoilt by the slightest movement.”
“I assure you that he will not stir, and he will do the same: ask him.”
“Can you be left free, my friend?”
“I can.”
“And you promise not to budge?”
“I promise, if I am ordered so.”
“I order you.”
“Upon my word, sir,” said the chief surgeon, “you speak with so much certainty that I am inclined to try the experiment.”
“Do so, and have no fear.”
“Unbind him,” said the surgeon.
As the men obeyed Balsamo went to the head of the couch.
“From this time forward do not stir till I bid you.”
A statue on a tombstone could not be more motionless than the patient after this command.
“Now, sir, proceed with the operation; the patient is properly prepared.”
The surgeon had his steel ready, but he hesitated at the beginning.
“Proceed,” repeated Balsamo with the manner of an inspired prophet.
Mastered as Marat and the patient had been and as all the rest were, the surgeon put the knife edge to the flesh: it “squeaked” literally at the cut, but the patient did not flinch or utter a sigh.
“What countryman are you, friend?” asked the mesmerist.
“From Brittany, my lord.”
“Do you love your country?”
“Ay, it is such a fine one,” and he smiled.
Meanwhile the operator was making the circular incisions which are the preliminary steps in amputations to lay the bone bare.
“Did you leave it when early in life?” continued Balsamo.
“I was only ten years old, my lord.”
The cuts being made, the surgeon applied the saw to the gash.
“My friend,” said Balsamo, “sing me that song the saltmakers of Batz sing on knocking off work of an evening. I only remember the first line which goes:
‘Hail to the shining salt!’”
The saw bit into the bone: but at the request of the magnetiser, the patient smilingly commenced to sing, slowly and melodiously like a lover or a poet:
“Hail to the shining salt,
Drawn from the sky-blue lake:
Hail to the smoking kiln,
And my rye-and-honey cake!
Here comes wife and dad,
And all my chicks I love:
All but the one who sleeps,
Yon, in the heather grove.
Hail! for there ends the day,
And to my rest I come:
After the toil the pay;
After the pay, I’m home.”
The severed limb fell on the board, but the man was still singing. He was regarded with astonishment and the mesmeriser with admiration. They thought both were insane. Marat repeated this impression in Balsamo’s ear.
“Terror drove the poor lad out of his wits so that he felt no pain,” he said.
“I am not of your opinion,” replied the Italian sage: “far from having lost his wits, I warrant that he will tell us if I question him, the day of his death if he is to die; or how long his recovery will take if he is to get through.”
Marat was now inclined to share the general opinion that his friend was mad, like the patient.
In the meantime the surgeon was taking up the arteries from which spirted jets of blood.
Balsamo took a phial from his pocket, let a few drops fall on a wad of lint, and asked the chief surgeon to apply this to the cut. He obeyed with marked curiosity.
He was one of the most celebrated operators of the period, truly in love with his science, repudiating none of its mysteries, and taking hazard as the outlet to doubt. He clapped the plug to the wound, and the arteries seared up, hissing, and the blood came through only drop by drop. He could then tie the grand artery with the utmost facility.
Here Balsamo obtained a true triumph, and everybody wanted to know where he had studied and of what school he was.
“I am a physician of the University of Gottingen,” he replied, “and I made the discovery which you have witnessed. But, gentlemen and brothers of the lancet and ligature, I should like it kept secret, as I have great fear of being burnt at the stake, and the Parliament of Paris might once again like the spectacle of a wizard being so treated.”
The head surgeon was brooding; Marat was dreaming and reflecting. But he was the first to speak.
“You asserted,” he said, “that if this man were interrogated about the result of his operation he would certainly tell it though it is in the womb of the future?”
“I said so: what is the man’s name?”
“Havard.”
Balsamo turned to the patient, who was still humming the lay.
“Well, friend, what do you augur about our poor Havard’s fate?” he asked.
“Wait till I come back from Brittany, where I am, and get to the Hospital where Havard is.”
“Of course. Come hither, enter, and tell me the truth about him.”
“He is in a very bad way; they have cut off his leg. That was neatly done, but he has a dreadful strait to go through; he will have fever to-night at seven o’clock – ”
The bystanders looked at each other.
“This fever will pull him down; but I am sure he will get through the first fit.”
“And will be saved?”
“No: for the fever returns and – poor Havard! he has a wife and little ones!”
His eyes filled with tears.
“His wife will be left a widow and the little ones orphans?”
“Wait, wait – no, no!” he cried, clasping his hands. “They prayed so hard for him that their prayers have been granted.”
“He will get well?”
“Yes, he will go forth from here, where he came five days ago, a hale man, two months and fifteen days after.”
“But,” said Marat, “incapable of working and consequently to feed his family.”
“God is good and he will provide.”
“How?” continued Marat: “while I am gathering information, I may as well learn this?”
“God hath sent to his bedside a charitable lord who took pity on him, and he is saying to himself: ‘I am not going to let poor Havard want for anything.’”
All looked at Balsamo, who smiled.
“Verily, we witness a singular incident,” remarked the head surgeon, as he took the patient’s hand and felt his pulse and his forehead. “This man is dreaming aloud.”
“Do you think so?” retorted the mesmerist. “Havard, awake,” he added with a look full of authority and energy.
The young man opened his eyes with an effort and gazed with profound surprise on the bystanders, become for him as inoffensive as they were menacing at the first.
“Ah, well,” he said, “have you not begun your work? Are you going to give me pain?”
Balsamo hastened to speak as he feared a shock to the sufferer. There was no need for him to hasten as far as the others were concerned as none of them could get out a word, their surprise was so great.
“Keep quiet, friend,” he said; “the chief surgeon has performed on your leg an operation which suits the requirement of your case. My poor lad, you must be rather weak of mind, for you swooned away at the outset.”
“I am glad I did for I felt nothing of it,” replied the Breton merrily: “my sleep was a sweet one and did me good. What a good thing that I am not to lose my leg.”
At this very moment he looked over himself, and saw the couch flooded with blood and the severed limb. He uttered a scream and swooned away, this time really.
“Question him, now, and see whether he will reply,” said Balsamo sternly to Marat.
Taking the chief surgeon aside while the aids carried the patient to his bed, he said:
“You heard what the poor fellow said – ”
“About his getting well?”
“About heaven having pity on him and inspiring a nobleman to help his family. He spoke the truth on that head as on the other. Will you please be the intermediary between heaven and your patient. Here is a diamond worth about twenty thousand livres; when the man is nearly able to go out, sell it and give him the money. Meanwhile, since the soul has great influence on the body, as your pupil Marat says justly, tell Havard that his future is assured.”
“But if he should not recover,” said the doctor hesitating.
“He will.”
“Still I must give you a receipt; I could not think of taking an object of this value otherwise.”
“Just as you please; my name is Count Fenix.”
Five minutes afterwards Balsamo put the receipt in his pocket, and went out accompanied by Marat.
“Do not forget your head!” said Balsamo, to whom the absence of mind in this cool student was a compliment.
Marat parted from the chief of the Order with doubt in his heart but meditation in his eyes, and he said to himself: “Does the soul really exist?”