The Queen's Necklace - Alexandre Dumas père (electric book reader TXT) 📗

have given you no cause to despise me."

"Oh, countess, you speak as if you were angry with me."

"No, monseigneur; you have not yet merited my anger."

"And I never will, madame. From this day, in which I have had the pleasure of making your acquaintance, my solicitude for you will not cease."

"Oh, sir, do not speak to me of your protection."

"Oh, mon Dieu! I should humiliate myself, not you, in mentioning such a thing;" and he pressed her hand, which he continued to hold, to his lips.

She tried to withdraw it; but he said, "Only politeness, madame," and she let it remain.

"To know," said she, "that I shall occupy a place, however small, in the mind of a man so eminent and so busy, would console me for a year."

"Let us hope the consolation will last longer than that, countess."

"Well, perhaps so, monseigneur; I have confidence in you, because I feel that you are capable of appreciating a mind like mine, adventurous, brave, and pure, in spite of my poverty, and of the enemies which my position has made me. Your eminence will, I am sure, discover all the good that is in me, and be indulgent to all the rest."

"We, are, then, warm friends, madame;" and he advanced towards her, but his arms were a little more extended than the occasion required. She avoided him, and said, laughing:

"It must be a friendship among three, cardinal."

"Among three?"

"Doubtless, for there exists an exile, a poor gendarme, who is called M. de la Motte."

"Oh, countess, what a deplorably good memory you have!"

"I must speak to you of him, that you may not forget him."

"Do you know why I do not speak of him, countess?"

"No; pray tell me."

"Because he will speak enough for himself: husbands never let themselves be forgotten. We shall hear that M. le Comte de la Motte found it good, or found it bad, that the Cardinal de Rohan came two, three, or four times a week to visit his wife."

"Ah! but will you come so often, monseigneur?"

"Without that, where would be our friendship? Four times! I should have said six or seven."

Jeanne laughed, "I should not indeed wonder in that case if people did talk of it."

"Oh! but we can easily prevent them."

"How?"

"Quite easily. The people know me----"

"Certainly, monseigneur."

"But you they have the misfortune not to know."

"Well?"

"Therefore, if you would----"

"What, sir?"

"Come out instead of me."

"Come to your hotel, monseigneur?"

"You would go to see a minister."

"Oh! a minister is not a man."

"You are adorable, countess. But I did not speak of my hotel; I have a house----"

"Oh! a petite maison?"

"No; a house of yours."

"A house of mine, cardinal! Indeed, I did not know it."

"To-morrow, at ten o'clock, you shall have the address."

The countess blushed; the cardinal took her hand again, and imprinted another kiss upon it, at once bold, respectful, and tender. They then bowed to each other.

"Light monseigneur down," said the countess; and he went away.

"Well," thought she, "I have made a great step in the world."

"Come," said the cardinal to himself as he drove off, "I think I have killed two birds with one stone; this woman has too much talent not to catch the queen as she has caught me?"


CHAPTER XVI.

MESMER AND ST. MARTIN.

The fashionable study in Paris at this time, and that which engrossed most of those who had no business to attend to, was Mesmerism--a mysterious science, badly defined by its discoverers, who did not wish to render it too plain to the eyes of the people. Dr. Mesmer, who had given to it his own name, was then in Paris, as we have already heard from Marie Antoinette.

This Doctor Mesmer deserves a few words from us, as his name was then in all mouths.

He had brought this science from Germany, the land of mysteries, in 1777. He had previously made his debut there, by a theory on the influence of the planets. He had endeavored to establish that these celestial bodies, through the same power by which they attract each other, exercised an influence over living bodies, and particularly over the nervous system, by means of a subtle fluid with which the air is impregnated. But this first theory was too abstract: one must, to understand it, be initiated into all the sciences of Galileo or Newton; and it would have been necessary, for this to have become popular, that the nobility should have been transformed into a body of savants. He therefore abandoned this system, and took up that of the loadstone, which was then attracting great attention, people fancying that this wonderful power was efficacious in curing illnesses.

Unhappily for him, however, he found a rival in this already established in Vienna; therefore he once more announced that he abandoned mineral magnetism, and intended to effect his cures through animal magnetism.

This, although a new name, was not in reality a new science; it was as old as the Greeks and Egyptians, and had been preserved in traditions, and revived every now and then by the sorcerers of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, many of whom had paid for their knowledge with their lives. Urbain Grandier was nothing but an animal magnetizer; and Joseph Balsamo we have seen practising it. Mesmer only condensed this knowledge into a science, and gave it a name. He then communicated his system to the scientific academies of Paris, London, and Berlin. The two first did not answer him, and the third said that he was mad. He came to France, and took out of the hands of Dr. Storck, and of the oculist Wenzel, a young girl seventeen years old, who had a complaint of the liver and gutta serena, and after three months of his treatment, restored her health and her sight.

This cure convinced many people, and among them a doctor called Deslon, who, from his enemy, became his pupil. Prom this time his reputation gradually increased; the academy declared itself against him, but the court for him. At last the government offered him, in the king's name, an income for life of twenty thousand francs to give lectures in public, and ten thousand more to instruct three persons, who should be chosen by them, in his system.

Mesmer, however, indignant at the royal parsimony, refused, and set out for the Spa waters with one of his patients; but while he was gone, Deslon, his pupil, possessor of the secret which he had refused to sell for thirty thousand francs a year, opened a public establishment for the treatment of patients. Mesmer was furious, and exhausted himself in complaints and menaces. One of his patients, however, M. de Bergasse, conceived the idea of forming a company. They raised a capital of 340,000 francs, on the condition that the secret should be revealed to the shareholders. It was a fortunate time: the people, having no great public events to interest them, entered eagerly into every new amusement and occupation; and this mysterious theory possessed no little attraction, professing, as it did, to cure invalids, restore mind to the fools, and amuse the wise.

Everywhere Mesmer was talked of. What had he done? On whom had he performed these miracles? To what great lord had he restored sight? To what lady worn out with dissipation had he renovated the nerves? To what young girl had he shown the future in a magnetic trance? The future! that word of ever-entrancing interest and curiosity.

Voltaire was dead; there was no one left to make France laugh, except perhaps Beaumarchais, who was still more bitter than his master; Rousseau was dead, and with him the sect of religious philosophers. War had generally occupied strongly the minds of the French people, but now the only war in which they were engaged was in America, where the people fought for what they called independence, and what the French called liberty; and even this distant war in another land, and affecting another people, was on the point of termination. Therefore they felt more interest just now in M. Mesmer, who was near, than in Washington or Lord Cornwallis, who were so far off. Mesmer's only rival in the public interest was St. Martin, the professor of spiritualism, as Mesmer was of materialism, and who professed to cure souls, as he did bodies.

Imagine an atheist with a religion more attractive than religion itself; a republican full of politeness and interest for kings; a gentleman of the privileged classes tender and solicitous for the people, endowed with the most startling eloquence, attacking all the received religions of the earth.

Imagine Epicurus in white powder, embroidered coat, and silk stockings, not content with endeavoring to overturn a religion in which he did not believe, but also attacking all existing governments, and promulgating the theory that all men are equal, or, to use his own words, that all intelligent beings are kings.

Imagine the effect of all this in society as it then was, without fixed principles or steady guides, and how it was all assisting to light the fire with which France not long after began to consume herself.


CHAPTER XVII.

THE BUCKET.

We have endeavored to give an idea in the last chapter of the interest and enthusiasm which drew such crowds of the people to see M. Mesmer perform publicly his wonderful experiments.

The king, as we know, had given permission to the queen to go and see what all Paris was talking of, accompanied by one of the princesses. It was two days after the visit of M. de Rohan to the countess. The weather was fine, and the thaw was complete, and hundreds of sweepers were employed in cleaning away the snow from the streets. The clear blue sky was just beginning to be illumined by its first stars, when Madame de la Motte, elegantly dressed, and presenting every appearance of opulence, arrived in a coach, which Clotilde had carefully chosen as the best looking at the Place Vendome, and stopped before a brilliantly-lighted house.

It was that of Doctor Mesmer. Numbers of other carriages were waiting at the door, and a crowd of people had collected to see the patients arrive and depart, who seemed to derive much pleasure when they saw some rich invalid, enveloped in furs and satins, carried in by footmen, from the evident proof it afforded that God made men healthy or unhealthy, without reference to their purses or their genealogies. A universal murmur would arise when they recognized some duke paralyzed in an arm or leg; or some marshal whose feet refused their office, less in consequence of military fatigues and marches than from halts made with the ladies of the Opera, or of the Comedie Italienne. Sometimes it was a lady carried in by her servants with drooping head and languid eye, who, weakened by late hours and an irregular life, came to demand from Doctor Mesmer the health she had vainly sought to regain elsewhere.

Many of these ladies were as well known as the gentlemen, but a great many escaped the public gaze, especially on this evening, by wearing masks; for there was a ball at the Opera that night, and many of them intended to drive straight there when they left the doctor's house.

Through this crowd Madame de la Motte walked erect and firm, also with a