“And this is what he did with the rest!”
Balthazar looked at his friend in bewilderment.
“And if you want to know how he got out,” Cornelius went on, dragging him to the window without giving him time to draw breath—look!”
He pointed at the uppermost pane, pierced by a little hole the size of a tennis-ball, so neat, so round and so perfect that the most skillful workman could not have done better.
“But who could have done all that?” Balthazar cried, finally, thinking that he must be dreaming.
“Simpleton! Don’t you see that it was THE LIGHTNING-BOLT!”
Such a bolt might have struck at Balthazar’s feet without him being more astonished—and he was about to demand explanations from Cornelius when the latter imposed silence on him and cocked an ear. A great clamor was going up in the direction of the quayside, and seemed to be coming up the street, getting closer all the while.
They opened the window and saw an agitated crowd, shouting and flowing all the way to the front steps, where it stopped to let through a stretcher borne by policemen, on which Christiane’s body was extended. The unfortunate child had thrown herself in the Amstel!
XI
At the sight of that pale face, those eyes that seemed to have closed forever, and those two rigid arms through which the cold of death had run, Balthazar and Cornelius precipitated themselves to the side of the stretcher, took the young woman in their arms, and transported her into the drawing-room, putting her down in front of the fire on a mattress that Monsieur Tricamp took it upon himself to set down. There, they tried to reanimate her, warming her up in their arms, pleading with her and appealing to her as if she were able to hear them—but her hands were icy. Her heart was no longer beating.
No one, on seeing their desperation, could have failed to feel his heart melt in tears. They begged her pardon; they accused themselves. Everyone was weeping, for the crowd had invaded the room and surrounded them.
Finally, in the midst of his agony, Cornelius had a flash of inspiration, and, gluing his lips to Christiane’s, he set about breathing in and out forcefully, facilitating the operation of the lungs with his hand.10 In the meantime, Monsieur Tricamp had earthenware and iron jars heated, and any others that might serve the same purpose, in order that they might be placed under the young woman’s arms and feet.
There was a terrible interval of anxiety and silence. The women whispered prayers, the men looked on, craning their necks…
“Bah!” said someone. “That’s a lot of trouble to go to for a thief!”
Balthazar leapt to his feet, but there was nothing for him to do—the man had already been thrown out.
“She’s breathing!” Cornelius exclaimed, breathlessly.
There was a shout of joy. Everyone believed in the theft, but what is the purpose of misfortune, if not to cause distress to the guilty?
A few minutes later, Christiane sighed, and a little life returned to her cheeks. A doctor who had arrived declared that she was saved, and had her carried into her bedroom. The women remained alone with her, undressing her and putting her to bed. Cornelius and Balthazar ran back and forth, mad with joy, giving advice through the door, asking whether anything was needed, running to fetch it, and, in the midst of all that, congratulating one another and shaking hands. As for the men, they gathered around the fire, discussing the best way of reanimating the drowned.
“Monsieur Balthazar,” said Monsieur Tricamp, “I shall retire, with my men, for the young woman is in no state to be arrested today…”
“Arrested!” cried Balthazar. “But hasn’t Cornelius told you? We’ve discovered the thief.”
“The thief!” replied Monsieur Tricamp. “Who is it, then?”
“The thunder!” said Balthazar.
Monsieur Tricamp’s eyes opened wide. “The thunder?”
“Yes, Monsieur Tricamp,” said Cornelius, in a slightly mocking tone. “The thunder—or, rather, the lightning. You apply physiology to the investigation of crimes; I apply physics.”
“And you’re telling me,” cried Monsieur Tricamp, exasperated, “that lightning has done all this?”
“It has done many other things!” replied Cornelius. “What about the nails from an armchair planted in a mirror without breaking it; a key extracted from its lock and hung up on its nail; cigarette papers delicately removed from a melted bronze case; money volatilized through the enamel of a purse that remains intact; a cobbler’s tools lifted up to the ceiling, so thoroughly magnetized that the nails run after the hammer like mad things; the wall that it uproots and carries 20 paces away; the pretty hole that it made in Christiane’s window and the wallpaper that it unstuck so carefully; and the locket whose two glass plates have been fused without the flower being affected, gallantly leaving our friend the most delightful ornament that one could ever see—and, for his future, a wedding-present that no workman could ever have made—and, finally, the golden frame with which it has completely decorated Christiane’s crucifix?”
“Get away!” replied Monsieur Tricamp. “That’s impossible.! What about the package—the package that she handed through the window to the man?”
“The man is present!” exclaimed Petersen. “That was me!”
“You?”
“Yes, Monsieur Tricamp—and the package was linen that she had prepared for my children, who are ill.”
“Good, good—linen!” said Tricamp, exasperated. “But what about the gold and the silver, the ducats and the florins, and the rest of the jewelry—where are they?”
“Of course!” said Cornelius, striking his forehead. “You’ve just reminded me…”
He leapt on to the table set against the wall, and overturned the bell, with a violent effort.
“Here they are!”
A large ingot of gold, silver and gemstones fell out of the bell, along with the detached clapper, all melted and fused together, as lightning can. The molten metal, charring the precious stones and pearls, had followed the conductive wire with the facility of movement and whimsical means that only electricity possesses, which has something prodigious and miraculous about it.
Monsieur Tricamp picked up the ingot and studied it in amazement.
He turned to Cornelius. “But what was it that put you on the track?” he said.
Cornelius smiled. “That black pearl, Monsieur Tricamp, which you handed to me yourself, challenging me to see it as a proof of innocence.”
“The black pearl!”
“Yes, Monsieur Tricamp—look at that imperceptible little white dot. It’s a burn! Providence requires no more to save a human creature.”
“My word, Monsieur,” said Tricamp, bowing to him, “the scientist is stronger than me; I salute you…and I shall start studying physics and meteorology. But it required no less than this evidence to relieve my mind of a suspicion that had begun to grow and for which I beg your pardon…that you were the demoiselle’s accomplice.”
“In the final analysis,” said Cornelius, laughing, “You can console yourself with that thought that you were not mistaken as to the thief’s sex: it was lightning!”11
Monsieur Tricamp removed himself in order not to hear anymore, followed by the crowd, whose members wanted to spread the strange news—and Gudule came to announce that Christiane was better, that she knew everything, and that she was asking to see them.
What can be said about that scene? Balthazar laughed; Cornelius wept; Christiane—who had been forbidden to speak—laughed and wept.
“My dear Christiane,” said Balthazar, kneeling beside the bed, “if you don’t want to offend me, don’t refuse the gift I’m going to make to you.” And he deposited the ingot of gold, silver and gems on the bed.
Christiane made a gesture of refusal.
“Oh!” said Balthazar, sharply, closing her mouth. “You need a dowry…”
“If you want me for a husband?” Cornelius added.
Christiane made no reply—but she looked at the virtuous scienti
st who had returned her honor and her life to her with moist eyes. And I can assure you—speaking as one who was there—that her gaze did not mean no.
X.B. Saintine: The Paradise of Flowers
(1864)
The Graf von Zoellern, a native of Germany, to which his turn of mind still linked him, was a little, slightly hunchbacked man, something of a joker, very knowledgeable, loquacious and methodical, and full of audacity in his theories. Having devoted himself to botany for only two years, he already claimed to be revolutionizing it from top to bottom—which gave rise to spirited debates between him and my savant doctor.
According to the latter, the Graf von Zoellern’s mind, knowledge and imagination—which he did not deny—were, like his personality and the first letter of his name, formed in a zigzag fashion. As for me, the little man’s eccentricities and audacious ideas did not displease me, any more than my eyes were offended by seeing his right shoulder positioned more highly than his left.
One evening, when there was to be a table-turning session at my house, and I was counting on the presence of Monsieur Marcillet and his faithful Alexis,12 the Graf and the doctor were the first to arrive—an alacrity which, I confess, astonished me on the doctor’s part; I strongly suspected him of having only come in the capacity of critic, opponent and spoilsport.
Having a few orders to give, I left them alone for a moment. When I came back, Zoellern was already in mid-argument, proving, or claiming to prove to his eternal antagonist that plants and animals not only manifested certain points of analogy and parallelism but a complete correspondence of structure and organization. That was, he said, a commonplace that was not even worth discussing. Plato and Empedocles had sufficiently elucidated the question 22 or 23 centuries ago, so he did not know why Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, in the philosophical system of L’Unité de l’Être, had not boldly commenced his zoological series with the most minimal of vegetables, to continue as far as humankind.
“Come on, Doctor, let’s reason it out. Taking the animal as the highest degree of the scale, what are its principal functions? It breathes, it absorbs, it digests, it reproduces itself. Doesn’t a plant do as much?
“Its leaves, veritable lungs, pump from the atmosphere the oxygen that will modify its sap, transforming it in the cambium, like our venous and arterial blood. But I don’t intend to give you a lesson in vegetable physiology. You know as well as I do that the assimilation of absorbed gases produces in plants, as in us, hydrogen, carbon dioxide, alkaline salts, calcium and magnesium phosphates, even nitrogen, which as thought until recently to be reserved to the animal kingdom. Liquids and solids similarly collaborate in developing their strength and furnishing their alimentation. Thus, plants nourish themselves, just like you and me. Look at enormous oaks and tropical trees, so tall, so stout and so sturdy; their cuisine is as good as ours!
“I agree that oaks are more vigorous, and even generally more upright than us,” said the doctor, with a certain malicious intent. “I also agree, wholeheartedly, that vegetables and animals have a few points of resemblance between them in their constitutive elements—but animals can move. Do you hear, Monsieur le Comte? They can move!”
“Not all, Doctor, not all! By no means! The polyp in its coral sheath, the oyster and the barnacle, fixed upon their rocks, and many others—are not they animals, although they remain in place?” Zoellern winked in my direction and added: “besides, plants—notably trees—have their own kind of locomotion. Once freed from the bonds than chain them to the soil, they have been seen to come and go, leap and caper, just as well as the most agile of quadrupeds.”
The doctor opened his eyes wide. “What trees do that?” he said. “Pray name the trees in question, Monsieur le Comte.”
“Only mentioning the most well-known, I cite the elm, the oak, the fir, the walnut—when they are transformed into table, of course…into turning tables.”
The dear doctor burst out laughing, got to his feet, articulated “Zigzag! Zigzag!” two or three times between his teeth, and started striding back and forth across the room in the manner of a man refusing to prolong a conversation.
I did not like to see it terminated thus; I picked it up at the point where it had been abandoned. That diabolical little man had the gift of amusing me royally. I smiled at the notion that before my guests were treated to a table-dance that evening, Zoellern’s idea might serve up, by way of accompaniment, a new theory on the much-debated subject. Unfortunately, he did not have and fully-formed opinion on that subject, so he came back very quickly to his plant-animals.
Zoellern was planning a new classification, a new nomenclature, in which he would include, pell-mell, fish and certain aquatic plants, which respire like them by means of veritable gills, and rise above the water like them to dive back into it by means of something akin to an air-bladder.
He found surprising analogies between reptiles and creepers or climbing plants; between vegetable and animal parasites. The family of rodents ought, in his view, be augmented by those plants that hollow out stone or wood—and he told me about 1000 other intentions that, if they sometimes lacked reason and logic, at least testified to the ingenuity of his mind and the activity of his imagination.
In the meantime, the doctor continued to stride back and forth across my floor in every direction. Soon, wearying of his stroll, and perhaps even more so of the silence that he had imposed on himself, he abruptly returned to us and, with his eyes flaming and his arms cross over his chest, he interrupted Zoellern in mid-sentence.
“Wretch!” he cried. “Is it chaos that you’re pretending to systematize, then? There exists between vegetables and animals one unbridgeable line of demarcation: sensitivity. Vegetables grow, they live, I grant you—but sed non sentiunt, as the great Linnaeus said.”13
“The great Linnaeus would be a donkey today,” Zoellern retorted.
On hearing this blasphemy I got up abruptly to protest, but on reflexion, I sat down again. I was curious to know how the little man would justify his enormity.
He did not give an inch. Without respite, arguing against the non sentiunt, he maintained tenaciously that all vegetable species bestirred themselves, not automatically, but purely by virtue of a sentiment of self-defense and self-preservation. He cited the means employed by the whole great family of mimosas to protect themselves from an impact or the violence of a storm; those by which the Dionaea14 traps an insect that wishes to live at its expense; the gyratory movements of the sainfoin; the evolutions of stamens toward pistils, and the modest quiverings of pistils at the approach of stamens—clear evidence of will, an aspiration toward a goal, sensation. How many animals of an inferior order seem to be endowed with less activity and rationality!
“Any wisely-calculated action is evidence of thought, and no thought can be conceived other than under a sensitive influence. By what right to you refuse an intellectual life to plants, since they know the emotions of love and the joys of maternity?
“As for their purely physical sensitivity, in spite of the non sentiunt, has your great Linnaeus observed that after the fatigues of the day they recuperate their strength by means of sleep? Monsieur Buffon himself, one day when he had forgotten to put his cuffs on, was prepared to admit that a plant resembles a dormant animal. The animal has woken up, doctor, it has woken up! After the scientific works by Borelli and Sébastien Vaillant on vegetal sensitivity, Jean de Gorter was the first to credit vital irritability to plants as well as animals.15 Jean Lups of Moscow and the Comte del Covolo of Florence established the proof of it.16 You can see that Russians, Germany and Italians are in accord in preaching that doctrine. The illustrious Charles Bonnet, a Swiss this time, and the Englishman Adanson have steered their research in the same direction and added further supporting evidence to the demonstration of this great verity.17 But that congress of sages lacked a Frenchman; the good Desfontaines has arrived, who has demonstrated in an ad hoc memoir that plants enjoy a real life.18 I therefore have against you, doctor, European scien
ce in its entirety. But don’t be so impatient! Let me finish…
“Do not plants, like us, need air and light? Do they not have their periods of growth, sometimes so risky; their diseases, so similar to ours; their hemorrhages of sap, like our hemorrhages of blood (pardon the pleonasm); chlorosis and phthisis? Frostbite, sunburn, wounds, asphyxia, even poisoning; everything that threatens our life puts theirs in danger; and, strangely enough—a further point of concordance between plants and animals—the same remedies are employed for their cure: iron sulphate for chlorosis, bleeding for plethoras; and moxas,19 incisions and amputations!
“All these maladies that they have in common with us, plants feel if they are suffering from them, and they do suffer from them, since they die of them.”
Thus spoke the Graf.
Truly, one would no longer dare to pluck a rose or have one’s grass mown.
The audacious little man was not about to stop there. Moving from induction to induction, he came to pose this question, which made the doctor and me start on the spot: “Why should plants not have souls?”
I protested; the doctor made no reply, but he drummed his fingers on his snuff-box, murmuring: “Zigzag, zigzag!”
“The idea is not mine,” Zoellern hastened to add. “It was originated by Thales—one of the seven sages of Greece, gentlemen as one contemporary members of the Académie des Sciences put it—but it has had its partisans a long time after that. Leibniz, who is also the great Leibniz, in his essay on Theodicy, was not afraid to propose that the divine seeds destined to become human souls, pre-exist in organic substances, where they are first subjected to a kind of apprenticeship. Malebranche and Bayle seem to be marching along the same road and, nearer to our own day, one even counts a physician among the declared partisans of that opinion—do you hear that, doctor? The physician Dédu—who was only on the faculty of Montpellier, it is true—has written a very curious book on the souls of plants.”20
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