‘That is Monsieur,’ the valet said, ‘you may watch him play if you wish,’ and he led them through the door on the left into a smaller chamber.
The room was almost as dimly lit as the hall. Wm could only just make out a heavy-looking man in a silk robe standing at a box-like instrument, in shape much like a harpsichord but larger and with an open top, over which his pudgy hands passed to and fro with surprising dexterity. As Wm’s eyes grew accustomed to the umbrous half-light (there were but two candles in the room), he could see that the man’s hands were passing over rows of glass tumblers and it was from these that this strange liquid sound flowed. Wm thought he recognised the melody and as he turned to Rosalie she whispered, ‘It is an air of Monsieur Mozart’s. Dr Mesmer was his patron, you know, back in Vienna, although he himself had little money to speak of. Now he could afford to commission a dozen operas. They say he makes five hundred louis a month from these seances.’
‘And that is Dr Mesmer? He looks like a pork butcher.’
‘But doesn’t he play divinely?’
The divine pork butcher abruptly stopped playing and drew a purple cloth over the glasses. Then he bowed to the half-dozen people who had gathered in the little music room and motioned to them to pass by him through the door into the chamber beyond, which the valet was already holding open for them.
As they walked past Dr Mesmer’s burly form, he bowed again and Wm found himself trembling, he could not think why. Was some vibration from the musical glasses still present in the room, or was there a draught coming from somewhere? Perhaps he was just shivering a little. It was a cool night and there was no fire lit in the music room.
They came into a much larger salon, also dimly lit. Somewhere in here too there was music playing, apparently from some kind of small organ, though he could not see the instrument. The room was dominated by two enormous wooden tubs, both some fifteen feet in diameter and perhaps two feet deep. Each tub was covered with a slatted wooden lid. Through holes cut in these lids there protruded iron rods to waist height. The rods were bent at the top so that they could be easily grasped by the persons sitting round the tub, ten or twelve of them being already seated, leaving only a couple of places free for Wm and Rosalie.
As Wm sat down, an elderly lady with a prominent goitre thrust out her hand impatiently, gesturing with her head that he should grasp it. ‘Quick, quick or the fluid will be lost.’
Her other hand was fiercely gripping the iron rod in front of her as though she would lose her balance if she let go. He reached out to take the iron rod in front of him. The metal was cold to the touch and he began to tremble again.
‘Is this your first visit, monsieur?’ the elderly lady murmured to him in hushed tones. Now that she had turned her face to him he could see how the goitrous swelling entirely filled the far side of her neck.
‘It is.’
‘Monday is always a good night.’
‘Why so, madame?’
‘Monsieur Mesmer magnetises the bottles on Monday morning, so the electric fluid is fresh. I had that from his chief assistant Monsieur d’Eslon.’
‘The bottles, madame?’
‘There, in the tub under the lid. They are arranged like the spokes of a wheel, so they pass the magnetism from one bottle to the next through the water, which is itself magnetised so that the effect is redoubled. Monsieur d’Eslon was good enough to have the lid removed and show me because I am such a good patient.’
‘And madame, pardon me for asking, but you are deriving great benefit from the treatment?’
‘Dr Mesmer is a genius,’ she said simply. ‘But now we must pay attention. Ah, I see it is time to change hands.’
Wm too saw the signal from a dignified gentleman dressed in a purple silk robe at the far end of their tub. For an irreverent moment Wm fancied that they were all seated at a gaming table and that the dignified gentleman was the croupier. Many of the patients looked as if they would have been quite at home in such a setting. But he pulled himself together and hastened to follow the actions of the lady with the goitre who had slipped her right hand out of his left and grasped the rod with it, reaching out to her neighbour on the far side with her left hand, which had previously been grasping the rod. Wm imitated her and gripped Rosalie’s hand, which felt warm and human.
‘Are you cured yet?’ she whispered.
‘I still haven’t decided what I’m suffering from.’
Rosalie stifled a giggle as the other patients round the tubs fell silent.
Dr Mesmer had entered the room. There was just enough light to see that he was wearing a purple silk coat of the same design as the dignified gentleman’s. He was bearing before him a long iron wand, beautifully wrought. He might have been a verger in a cathedral. He approached the circle of patients round the tub (Wm had counted that there were sixteen of them) and bowed his head to each patient as he passed. It was a solemn sort of nod he gave but somehow intimate too, the sort of nod that a verger might give the altar he passed in front of twenty times a day. He made a circuit of each tub, then paused for an instant, his head sunk on his massive chest, seemingly lost in complex thought. Was he gathering his therapeutic forces or making some diagnostic calculation? The hushed breath of so many gathered in the two circles created an atmosphere of suspense and expectation that Wm began to find unsettling. And the room was so cold. Once again he became conscious of a draught of air that carried a curious musty smell like rotten apples.
With an abrupt movement Mesmer raised his head, as though he had at last come to a conclusion. Then, lowering the wand slightly and pointing it out in front of him, he approached the nearest patient, a rough-looking elderly man with a red carbuncular face. The man stood up and rolled down the grubby canary stocking on his right leg, and clasping his knee in both hands raised his trembling withered shank.
Dr Mesmer bent forward, seemingly to inspect the miserable limb, then with great deliberation applied the wand about halfway up the old man’s calf. The touch appeared light but firm and lasted perhaps five seconds.
The man’s whole body shuddered visibly and he let go of the leg, which immediately trembled with considerable violence so that he had to sit down with a thump to avoid falling over. Mesmer paused in front of the patient for a further five seconds as though to make sure that the treatment had been effective, before passing on to the next patient, a youngish woman who made an awkward curtsy to him. But Wm kept his eyes fixed on the man with the red face who was still stricken with convulsions the whole length of his body. Far from quietening as Mesmer passed on, he seemed to be increasingly affected. His head began to roll from side to side and he was shaken by a barking sort of cough that sounded close to laughter.
‘He is one of our most sensitive patients,’ the lady with the goitre whispered. ‘With some of us the magnetism may take half an hour or more to make its effects felt, but with him, pouf, he goes straight off. In five minutes he’ll be in the salle des crises. Look, here comes Monsieur d’Eslon already.’
The dignified gentleman held out his hand to the old man who consented to be led away through a small side door previously concealed by draperies.
‘He’ll be as right as rain in there,’ the lady with the goitre said. ‘The walls are padded with the softest silk, it is impossible to harm oneself.’
‘Have you yourself, madame …’
‘Certainly not, monsieur. My affliction does not produce such gross symptoms. Monsieur d’Eslon conducts new patients there to reassure them.’ But she spoke with a hint of wistfulness as though one’s treatment might not be complete without a spell in the salle des crises.
As Mesmer approached – he was only three patients away now – Wm became uncomfortably aware that he would have to exhibit some kind of malady if he was not to be unmasked as a fraudulent intruder. What would happen if he indicated some supposedly defective limb or region of the body and Dr Mesmer were able to tell at a glance that there was nothing wrong with it?
He was deflected
from these alarmed thoughts by the sight of the lady with the goitre half rising from her seat and leaning forward to press her neck against the bent end of the nearest iron rod. She was still holding his hand and so pulled him towards her as she rose, and he had a glimpse of the dark shiny rod pressing into the discoloured flesh of her swelling. Being pulled so close to her he could feel her trembling the whole length of her body.
Then she turned round to face Mesmer. She was still holding Wm’s hand and he could sense her bracing herself as she bowed to the doctor, who then raised his wand to the side of her neck where the other rod had been only a few seconds earlier. He held it there, this time for what Wm thought an unconscionable period, then gently took it away. She sank down in her chair, no longer trembling but apparently exhausted of all energy, quite unlike the man with the carbuncles in her reaction.
While this was going on, Wm had stopped fretting about what his own malady should be and to his relief an answer came to him. He suddenly remembered that a few months earlier when he had still been at St Germain and paying regular visits to the house with the dolphin over the door his horse had slipped on the wet leaves in the street and had thrown him. It was not a bad fall (the horse was only walking at the time) but he had come off at an awkward angle and twisted his back. The next morning he had found it difficult to stand up straight and he had to go about at a half-crouch for a week or so.
So when Mesmer stood before him and gave his by now familiar little nod, Wm nodded in reply and then turned round to face the tub again and, inclining forward, twisted his arm round and tapped his back in what he thought might be a plausible region.
There was a short pause during which he maintained this twisted posture. Then to his surprise he felt the tap of Mesmer’s wand not anywhere on his back but on the top of his shoulder rather as though he were being dubbed a knight. He had read in a newspaper that with some medical complaints the seat of the disease or infection might lie in a different place from that in which the pain was experienced. Perhaps the muscle causing the supposed inflammation lower down was located up in the scapular region.
Wm waited. Surely the rod would be applied again, perhaps for a longer period, as with the other patients. But nothing happened. Then it dawned upon him that the tapping on the shoulder might be not so much part of the treatment as purely designed to attract his attention.
He turned round and faced the doctor again. Mesmer’s eyes burnt like hot coals out of his broad pudgy face. He was a large man, a head taller than Wm, and he seemed to bear down on the young American as though he would drive him into the ground by the sheer intensity of his gaze. But his voice, when he came to speak, was soft with only faint traces of a Viennese accent and it had no hint of oppressive force in it. ‘You are very welcome, monsieur. We are always glad to see observers at our sessions. Only thus can science hope to advance.’
He tapped him on the shoulder again with his wand, a light casual tap, a friendly dismissal. Then he moved on to the next patient who was Rosalie.
Although she had teased him about the illnesses that he might counterfeit, he had not quizzed her as to what she herself would say. She was so quick-witted she would think of something at a minute’s notice. At any rate he was sure that she would extract full value from the encounter.
Instead of merely bowing to the doctor like the others, she went up close to him and murmured a few words to him, much too low for Wm to catch.
Mesmer nodded and turned to beckon a valet to bring up a chair, gesturing to Rosalie that she should turn her own chair round. They sat down facing one another, so close that Mesmer’s knees enclosed hers. Wm could hear the rustle of her grey silk dress against the coarser material of his breeches, which were now visible as the purple robe fell open. Mesmer raised the palms of his hands and very slowly drew them down her body from the high sash just below her breasts all the way down to her thighs. Then he leant a little further forward so that his face was only a few inches from hers, and he passed his right hand behind her body, moving it with the utmost deliberation down from her shoulder blades to a point below her waist. There he paused. They sat frozen in this intimate proximity for what must have been a minute or more. Then he took his hand away and clambered out of his chair in a clumsy motion quite unlike the precise delicacy of his movements a few seconds before, as though he like his patients was emerging disorientated from an experience akin to a trance.
Then he bowed to her, but she seemed too overcome to respond and continued to sit in the posture in which he had placed her, her head lowered, her hands clasped in her lap, in a posture of utter submission like a servant being reprimanded by her mistress.
Wm was discomfited by this sight. He had never seen her other than ebullient and blooming with self-confidence and energy. But he could find no words to console her if consolation was what she needed. He looked at Mesmer in the hope that he might do something to restore her, but the doctor’s burly figure had moved on and was already bowing to the next patient.
A spasm of indignation overtook Wm, putting to flight the amused scepticism he had sought to maintain ever since they had entered the rue Coq Heron and observed the pretentious torches blazing outside the doctor’s mansion. Who was this fat charlatan to prey upon the sick and defenceless with his parlour tricks? Wm reckoned they had some pretty fancy customers back home, travelling wizards who sold poultices to cure cancers and oils that offered infallible protection against rattlesnakes. But this variety of deceit was altogether more double-dyed.
At last Rosalie made a sign to him that she wished to leave the seance – she still appeared incapable of speech – and he led her out into the dark hall, now more or less deserted. But it was not until the German porter had whistled up the coach and they were safely trotting back towards the rue de Seine that he dared to speak to her. ‘What … what did you say to him?’
‘Oh, nothing, nothing of any consequence,’ she murmured in a distracted manner. ‘I told him that I had a malady of the digestion, not at all grave.’
‘And what happened?’
She opened her mouth, then checked as if uncertain what words to use, before continuing: ‘It was very curious. His hands did not touch me at all, did not even touch against my dress, and yet there was a sensation of heat all the way down my body and down my back too when he placed his hand there.’
‘Was it pleasant?’
‘Neither pleasant nor unpleasant. The heat just travelled down me, as though someone was shining a torch on my bare skin but not even grazing it. It was a level, even heat, and afterwards I felt very tired, although I had not moved a muscle. I feel so ashamed of myself.’
She was near tears, but Wm thought she did not sound unhappy. Even her confession of shame sounded oddly formal, as though shame was the sentiment she knew she ought to feel whereas what she felt in fact was something quite different, such as relief or even happiness, which Wm could not understand at all. He even began to feel rather jealous that Dr Mesmer had declined to treat his backache seriously.
And when she dropped him off near the Ministère de la Marine, there was, no, not coolness between them but a little distance.
‘William, did you manage to find the time yesterday to drop by for that book of d’Argenville’s?’
‘Ah, no, how forgetful of me.’
‘No matter, no matter. I’ll send Vendôme over this afternoon.’
‘I would not dream of permitting such a thing, sir. I’ll get it myself directly.’
Where in hell’s name was it? Of course, he had left it propped under the bunk seat of the Duchess’s coach. They had been so overwrought when they parted that he had forgotten about it. Who knew where on earth it was now?
He hailed a cab in the Champs-Elysées and was back in the rue de Seine within half an hour. With luck he could sneak through the side door into the stable yard and retrieve the cursed volume. Surely the coachman would not have been so punctilious as to clean out the carriage already.
But as he w
as sidling through the little colonnade, he was hailed by a hearty cry. ‘Ah there you are, monsieur. We have been looking for you everywhere.’
‘For me?’ Wm stared agape at the servant. This was very bad. Was he already known to be a skulker round the back parts of the hotel?
‘Yes indeed. His Grace will be so glad I caught you, he is most anxious to thank you.’
‘Thank me?’
‘Yes, monsieur. Please follow me.’ Blushing and bewildered, Wm was led up the great marble staircase between the weary tritons holding up the balustrade with one hand and blowing their curly horns with the other. The huissier showed him into the library on the first floor, where the Duke sat surrounded by books covering every desk and bureau plat and spilling over the floor, some with tasselled markers, others kept open by their spines spreadeagled. At the Duke’s side sat a neat man, his grey hair cropped close to his scalp and a look of extreme alertness on his face.
‘You know Monsieur B-Bailly, the great astronomer?’
The neat man winced at this description and in the same moment rose briskly to take Wm’s hand.
‘Do s-sit down, my dear Mr Short,’ the Duke said. ‘I am so much in your debt. You should not have left my house without giving me a chance to thank Monsieur Jefferson for his generosity and you for your kindness in personally delivering this magnificent work. As it was, I had to deduce the identity of the messenger from the coachman’s report that the handsome young American brought it – my dear Short, you should not blush at a compliment from a c-coachman.’
Now for the first time Wm spied the d’Argenville book in its red-and-gold binding lying on the table in the clutter of brown wrapping paper.
‘If old Labiche had not written “for Mr Jefferson” on the parcel, we would not even have known whom to thank.’
The Duke smiled and Monsieur Bailly smiled too, by proxy as it were. Wm bowed in acknowledgement, desperately calculating whether he had time to reach Labiche’s before the old brute put up his shutters and whether in any case he would have another copy to sell him, no doubt at the same extortionate price.
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