Thus, I had acquired the proof that, not only does the total adduction of the thumb characterize death, but that this phenomenon indicates the approach of death in proportion to its intensity.  I, therefore, possessed the fundamental principle of a system of semeiotics hitherto unknown to physiologists; but this principle, already so full of interest, must be made profitable to art.

A multitude of pictures, which in former times I had admired at the museum, passed before my mind’s eye.  I recalled battle-scenes where the dying and the dead are represented; descents from the cross where Christ is necessarily represented as dead.  The idea struck me that I would go and verify the action of the thumb in these various representations which the painter’s fancy has given us of death.

It was on a Sunday.  The Louvre was on my way to the Conservatory, where, as is well known, I lived as pensioner.

I had often traversed the galleries of the Louvre; but now I was armed with a criterion that would give my criticisms indisputable authority.

The ignorance of the fact I sought, even among artists of renown, was not long in being made apparent:  all those hands, where they thought they had depicted death, afforded me nothing but the characteristics of a more or less peaceful sleep.  The correctness of my criticism may be verified anywhere.

Thus, the mere discovery of a law sufficed to elevate a poor boy of fifteen years, destitute of all science and deploring the deep ignorance in which he had hitherto been left, to the height of an infallible critic in whom the greatest artists found no mercy.  I then understood all the power, all the fertility given by an acquaintance with the laws that regulate the nature of man, and in how much even genius itself may be rendered sterile by ignorance of those laws which simple observation would make them acquainted with.  But, I thought, my discovery is not complete, for if, thanks to it, I have succeeded in proving that all these pictures of death are false, true only as representing sleep, it is, on the other hand, impossible for me to prove in how far those figures live, in which the painter aims to represent life.  I must, therefore, seek the sign of life to complete my standard of criticism.

Suddenly, struck with amazement by the dazzling rays of unexpected light, I asked myself whether the criterion of death would not reveal to me, by the law of contraries, the thermometer of life.  It should a priori—­it does!

Still I felt that it was not here that I might be permitted to contemplate the vital phenomena attached to the thumb:  since death was so badly rendered here, I had strong reasons for thinking that life was no better treated.

I left the museum, then, where I had nothing more to learn; and, to observe living mimetics of the thumb, I went out on the promenade of the Tuileries thronged by aristocratic people.  I carefully examined the hands of this crowd, but I was not long in discovering that these elegant idlers had nothing good to offer.  “This class,” I said to myself, “is false from head to foot.  They live an artificial, unnatural life.  I see in them only artifice, or an art dishonored by using it to mask their insincerity and artificiality.”