Martyrs of Science

by S. Henry Berthoud

  “Well,” said the unknown man, wrapping himself even more tightly in the folds of an ample cloak lined with a fine and rich sable fur, “it seems that you’ve gone astray in the forest. An unfortunate thing, believe me! The fog doesn’t allow a man to see two paces ahead of him, night’s falling, the wolves are howling and you have no weapons.”

  “Yes I have,” replied Tiot Watremetz, testily and almost angrily. “Yes I have—I have this holly-wood staff. So long as I hold it in my hand, so long as it’s connected to my wrist by its leather cord, I fear no wolf, nor man, nor devil.”

  “Well,” replied the unknown man, “the wolves are beginning to get hungry, thieves haunt the woods, and the Devil might well be here, lurking in some corner. I’m told that he likes this crossroads well enough.”

  “Where are we, then?”

  “At the Sabbat crossroads.”

  “The Sabbat crossroads!” the farmer repeated, going pale.

  “A pretty spot—but not at this hour, and even less so at midnight.”

  “You’re right,” Tiot Watremetz replied. “Thank you for having informed me as to my path. I’ll be home in an hour.”

  “Unless something unfortunate happens—which I hope it won’t. Au revoir.”

  “God bless you,” replied Tony Watremetz, who set out again with his firmest stride. He was not sorry to quit the man, for whom he felt, without any reason, a profound and invincible aversion.

  On hearing the farmer’s last words, the unknown individual, struck by a sudden indisposition, nearly fainted. Pale and trembling, scarcely able to stand up, he would have fallen but for a tree, against which he leaned. At any rate, the indisposition in question disappeared as quickly as it had arrived, and five minutes had not gone by when a strident voice called Tiot Watremetz back.

  “Hey, friend!” the voice cried. “You’ve forgotten something. Wait for me—I’ll return it to you.”

  Tiot Watremetz turned round and found himself face to face for a second time with the singular individual whose voice he had just heard coming from more than two mencaudees away.69

  “Are you very rich, then, to strew bags of coins around forests like this?” the other asked him, presenting him with a bulging leather bag.

  “That bag isn’t mine.”

  “Whose can it be, then? Aren’t you curious to see what it contains? There must be at least two hundred écus in it.”

  “I feel sorry for the man who lost it, and I urge you to take it to the burgomaster of the nearest hamlet.”

  “Oh yes! If you’d found the bag, would you take it to the burgomaster of the nearest hamlet?

  “Wouldn’t you do as much yourself?”

  “Me? Well, perhaps I’d return it to its owner, if I knew who he was—but the burgomaster! The burgomaster would simply put it in his own strong-box, and neither I nor the owner would ever here mention of it again. Then again, look at the bag—it’s been lying for a devil of a long time in the corner where I just changed to unearth it with the tip of my stick. Shall I give you some good advice? Let’s split it.”

  “Take what doesn’t belong to me?”

  “Pick up what belongs to anyone, that’s all.”

  The bag seemed to grow and triple in size in the unknown man’s hand. “Well,” he murmured, “I said two hundred écus—it’s a thousand, two thousand, four thousand gold coins that the purse contains. Oh! Rich gems, admirable diamonds hidden at the very bottom, underneath that beautiful round sum. Have you ever seen so much gold in all your life?”

  “No,” replied Tiot Watremetz, almost angrily, darting a covetous glance at the treasure in spite of himself. “Go to the Devil and leave me in peace!”

  He started walking again.

  “To the Devil!” sniggered the other. “One could do worse. I’ve heard it said that the Devil isn’t always a bad companion. Since you’re refusing to share with me, I’ll keep it all.”

  He ran after Tiot Watremetz then, who was just entering a large field in which more pebbles grew that wheat. It was known as the Field of Stones because of the druidic monuments that loomed up on all sides. Catherine, the farmer’s wife, had brought it to him as a dowry.

  The nocturnal tempter casually linked arms with the farmer, who was not at all pleased by that familiarity.

  “Look,” he said, “you understand, don’t you, that all this is a joke? The purse is mine, and I only showed it to you for a bit of fun. But come on, be frank. If you found a bag like mine on your path, wouldn’t you pick it up?”

  “No.”

  “And if you found ten?”

  “I wouldn’t steal them, I tell you.”

  “And if they contained millions? Enough to become a great lord? To do anything you might wish? To see others at your feet, as submissive as serfs, as slaves? To swim in opulence instead of crouching in poverty! To rest instead of working! To command instead of obeying! Well, what do you say?”

  “What’s the point of replying, since all those treasures aren’t here?”

  “They are here! Here they are!” said the unknown man, who, clapping him on the shoulder, bumped into one of those druidic monuments that one encounters so frequently in certain parts of France, where they litter the fields.

  The stone fell over with a formidable sound, and revealed, at the bottom of a gaping hole, such a mass of gold that a king could not have spent it in a year.

  “You’re Satan in person, then? “ said Tiot Watremetz, raising his hand to make the sign of the cross.

  “I am, as they say, an old devil—and nothing more!” he retorted, laughing—for he was always laughing, and his laughter made Tiot Watremetz feel ill. “Once, twice, you don’t want to have anything to do with me? Done.”

  Giving the farmer a clap on the shoulder, he replaced the stone and vanished.

  Tiot Watremetz went home, so pensive that his wife asked him what was the matter with him. He told her, sighing, what had happened to him.

  It was his wife’s turn to become pensive. That hardly ever happened, for there was no housewife for ten leagues around more lively, more good-humored and, above all, so determined. Needless to say, the two spouses spent a sleepless night. At daybreak, Catherine got up, got dressed, told her husband to do likewise, and to put a pickaxe over his shoulder, picked up another herself, and marched straight to the Field of Stones.

  Tony Watremetz showed Catherine the block of sandstone that the unknown man had moved so briskly the day before. They noticed, fearfully, three black holes in the middle of the block that looked as if they had been hollowed out by fingers of red hot iron. Their terror increased further on seeing, in the wet grass, footprints that had not only burned the grass but charred the soil. There could no longer be any doubt about it; Tiot Watremetz had been dealing with the Devil.

  Catherine made the sigh of the cross, and her pick-axe struck the ground first. “God help us,” she said, “this sterile field belongs to us. Let’s dig and take possession of the treasure!”

  They worked thus for nearly a month, hollowing out a wide ditch, but only arrived, after so much labor and effort, at a layer of shiny black rock, so friable that it broke effortlessly beneath the pick. You can imagine their disappointment.

  “You wanted to enter into a contest with the Devil,” sighted Tiot Watremetz, piteously. “You see what so much trouble has got us.”

  A burst of laughter relied to those words, and a mysterious individual appeared, sitting on a druidic stone, without them having been able to see where he had come from or how he had got there. Tiot Watremetz recognized the traveler he had met a month before.

  “Well, he who plays with fire burns his fingers!” he sniggered, in his shrill voice. “You wanted to match wits with a spirit and you’re nothing but imbeciles! Here, look!”

  He picked up three or four pieces of the black stone that the ditch contained, arranged them in a heap, put some wooden branches underneath and rubbed the end of his finger against the ground. Immediately, a lively flame emerged fr
om his fingertip, with the aid of which he lit the little bundle of twigs. The black stones caught fire in their turn, and produced a blazing fire.

  “If there’s no gold there, isn’t this just as good?” he asked. “There’s a shortage of wood in the region, and the neighboring forest, devastated by incessant felling, will soon contained nothing but saplings. This ditch, whose seams of coal extend for more than a league underground, contains enough to heat ten whole provinces for a century. Exploit it, and you’ll become richer than the gentleman who refused Lazarus the crumbs from his table.”

  “What are you asking in exchange for the mine? For once you’ve gone, we won’t find anything there any longer. The coal it contains will go the same way as the gold it enclosed the other day.”

  “I like your pretty little wife’s common sense!” he riposted, sitting down more comfortably on the stone on top of which he was perched. “Let’s see! For ten years I’ll guarantee you health proof against anything, and a fortune to make the jealous people in your village die of jealousy—which is to say, all the inhabitants except one.”

  “Ten years!” said Catherine disdainfully. “You’re hardly generous.”

  “Damn! One doesn’t dicker with you very easily, or very cheaply. Well, let’s make it twelve years.”

  “No—fifteen.”

  “Twelve! I won’t be beaten down by a minute.”

  “And after that twelve years?”

  “I’ll come and offer you a hand, to guide you to another mine much richer than this one. Go on—sign and let’s get it over with. The Angelus won’t be long in sounding, and I have urgent business that doesn’t permit me to linger, or to hear the sound of that annoying bell.”

  “I accept,” said Catherine, “but alone. My husband, you understand, doesn’t enter into the bargain at all.”

  “I’d rather have one woman that thirty thousand simpletons like him. Sign this little parchment for me.”

  “I don’t know how to write. I’ll put my cross.”

  Satan trembled more than Tiot Watremetz was trembling, who was nevertheless on the brink of fainting.

  “Put your finger in the mud and press it on the paper. Good! Au revoir!”

  The earth opened up beneath his feet and he vanished.

  “What have you done, Catherine? What have you done?” groaned Tiot Watremetz.

  “Continue to live in peace like the good Christian you are,” she replied. “Satan’s reputed to be very clever, but however smart he is, women don’t lose out to him in comparison.”

  For eleven years, eleven months and thirty days, nothing troubled the ever-increasing prosperity of Tiot Watremetz and his wife. Six thousand workers employed in the coal mine revealed by Satan and nine others located not far away were not sufficient to meet the demands of the various customers who came to buy the coal.

  Gold flooded into Messire Watremetz’s house—or, rather, château, for Catherine had acquired noble titles for him. Furthermore, the fashion in which she spent her vast fortune won her the affection and respect of everyone. She founded hospitals, built churches, endowed poor girls, lent money to the needy and gave to the indigent, and attracted more blessings than the archbishop himself, even though he was universally deemed to be a very charitable prelate.

  On the evening of the thirty-first day of the twelfth month of the twelfth year, Satan came into Catherine’s room. He bowed to her in a sprightly fashion, and, with the air of a well-bred gentleman, told her in fine words that he was at her disposal to undertake the journey promised in the terms of their agreement.

  “I was expecting you,” she replied, graciously, with one of her finest curtsies. “Just grant me the time to give a few orders.”

  “To have more hospitals and churches built, I suppose? My word, no! The use you’ve made of the fortune you owe to my munificence has been too silly for me to let you continue with such a scandal. Good works, as you call them, displease me royally.”

  “You’ll permit me, at least, to say goodbye to my husband?”

  “Never mind that! Petty people’s manners, my dear. Let’s go!”

  “An honest woman keeps her word. When midnight chimes, I’ll go with you.” She stood up and put on her mantle. “How cold it is!” she said. “I’m shivering from head to toe. Outside, I feel sure, it’s cold enough to crack stones. I need to bring a little heat with me. Hold on, I’ll just throw this bundle of carnation stems on the fire. Promise me you won’t take me until they’re consumed—it’ll only take a quarter of a minute.”

  “By my pitchfork!” cries Satan, impatiently. “There’s never an end to it with women. You won’t be cold where I’m taking you. Come on!”

  “If you don’t grant my request,” she said, laughing, “if you don’t swear to me not to take me until this bundle is burned, I warn you, I’ll make a fuss. I’ll resist and call for help—beware of the curé and his exorcisms!”

  “I swear to you, then!” he cried, irritably. “But hurry up, or I’ll use violence.”

  Instead of throwing the handful of carnation stems into the fire, she plunged them into a font full of holy water hidden behind her.

  Satan uttered a howl of range that was audible a league away. Catherine started laughing so loudly that she had to hold her sides.

  “Get away, simpleton!” she said, when the stifling laughter permitted her to speak. “Get away with your scant shame, presumptuous as you’ve been to match wits with a woman. Get away, I tell you, or I’ll sprinkle you with this holy water from your horns to your cloven feet. Return alone to your eternal furnace, and may my endless prayers, when God admits me to his paradise, add to your chagrin and your despair!” As she finished speaking she brandished an aspergillum, which put the accursed angel to flight.

  Don’t believe, however, that the Demon did not avenge himself for his disappointment. The next day, water flooded Tiot Watremetz’s coal mines; there were terrible collapses; fire-damp caused terrible ravages there, and the edifice of the two spouses’ immense fortune did not take long to crumble. They scarcely retained enough to live on, and that humbly.

  But, as Dame Catherine observed, maliciously, the poverty that Satan inflicted upon them only served to ease their road Heaven, since it is specifically written in the gospel: “Blessed art the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.”

  Such is the legend that was recounted to me in my infancy by a sexagenarian maidservant, the daughter of a foreman in the mines of Anzin. At present, who knows whether anyone except me still knows the tale, three or four hundred years old, transmitted from mouth to mouth, which is perhaps being written down for the first time today? The humblest engineer knows better than the Medieval Satan how to discover coal mines; pumps powered by steam intercept and expel subterranean waters; scaffolding simply and expertly disposed reduce collapses, and fire-damp, which has simply become carbonated hydrogen, is stopped, impotently, by the metallic sheath with which Davy has enveloped the lamps that bar his name. Science arrives and legend, alas, goes away.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who, in the Nouvelle Héloïse, shows us with so much aplomb the imaginary art of manufacturing fine vintages with simple wines of any kind, said nevertheless: “I will only believe in chemistry on the day when chemistry can recombine what it breaks down.”

  Thank God, twenty years later, chemistry has realized and exceeded the program of the author of Émile. Like it or not, it is necessary today to believe in chemistry. There is no lack of convincing facts, and they are becoming more numerous every day.

  Monsieur Barouilhet,70 for example, has just provided the solution of one of the gravest problems of geology. He has produced artificial coal.

  To obtain this result, which the 16th century would have regarded as sorcery, and the eighteenth as a endeavor akin to the conjuring tricks of the Comte Saint-Germain, he interposes layers of ligneous matter between layers of marl and encloses them in a vessel that without being completely sealed, is nevertheless disposed in such a fashion that the
gases disengaged can remain for a determined time in contact with the wood and marl.

  He then submits that preparation to a temperature that scarcely surpasses two hundred degrees, and he obtains products that completely resemble coal; we might even say that they are identical to it.

  The coal modifies its nature in accordance with the wood employed and the more or less powerful effect of the temperature. A few leaves placed between the layers have left their imprint on the artificial coal—literally, as one sees in natural blocks extracted from mines.

  It results from this experiment that of all the theories made on the formation of coal, one alone is true: the one that attributes it to masses of vegetation assembled by waters, rather like peat-bogs, and then submitted to the effects of the central fire of the globe, then much more powerful than in our day.

  How much there is in a sonnet! said the fine minds of Louis XIV’s court, although they had other reasons for admiration around them, including Molière and Bossuet. Can the 19th century not cry, with more reason, and a more legitimate pride: How much there is in a lump of coal!

  Even Louis XIV and his court would recognize today that a lump of coal and its products are worth more than a faultless sonnet, which, according to Boileau, was itself worth as much as a long poem.

  There is everything in oil, even essences for confectionery.

  When one distils coal, one obtains three substances: one solid, coke; the second liquid, tar; and the third gaseous, carbonated hydrogen. One can also harvest waters from it from which one can extract, in abundance and cheaply, ammonia, widely used in industry, which, at the end of the last century, was bought from Orientals at a high price, it being claimed that it could only be obtained from camel dung.

  You are familiar with the immediate employments of coke and hydrogen; one lights, the other heats.

  As for the tar, such as it emerges from the retort, its employment is less immediate. People have tried to substitute it for asphalt in road-building but it lacks solidity and resistance; the feet sink into the black layers, almost as they do in mud, except that one does not get them out so easily.