This assurance did not prevent old Minoret from keeping the appointment made for him by Bouvard.  After an enmity of forty-four years the two antagonists met beneath a porte-cochere in the Rue Saint-Honore.  Frenchmen have too many distractions of mind to hate each other long.  In Paris especially, politics, literature, and science render life so vast that every man can find new worlds to conquer where all pretensions may live at ease.  Hatred requires too many forces fully armed.  None but public bodies can keep alive the sentiment.  Robespierre and Danton would have fallen into each other’s arms at the end of forty-four years.  However, the two doctors each withheld his hand and did not offer it.  Bouvard spoke first:—­

“You seem wonderfully well.”

“Yes, I am—­and you?” said Minoret, feeling that the ice was now broken.

“As you see.”

“Does magnetism prevent people from dying?” asked Minoret in a joking tone, but without sharpness.

“No, but it almost prevented me from living.”

“Then you are not rich?” exclaimed Minoret.

“Pooh!” said Bouvard.

“But I am!” cried the other.

“It is not your money but your convictions that I want.  Come,” replied Bouvard.

“Oh! you obstinate fellow!” said Minoret.

The Mesmerist led his sceptic, with some precaution, up a dingy staircase to the fourth floor.

At this particular time an extraordinary man had appeared in Paris, endowed by faith with incalculable power, and controlling magnetic forces in all their applications.  Not only did this great unknown (who still lives) heal from a distance the worst and most inveterate diseases, suddenly and radically, as the Savior of men did formerly, but he was also able to call forth instantaneously the most remarkable phenomena of somnambulism and conquer the most rebellious will.  The countenance of this mysterious being, who claims to be responsible to God alone and to communicate, like Swedenborg, with angels, resembles that of a lion; concentrated, irresistible energy shines in it.  His features, singularly contorted, have a terrible and even blasting aspect.  His voice, which comes from the depths of his being, seems charged with some magnetic fluid; it penetrates the hearer at every pore.  Disgusted by the ingratitude of the public after his many cures, he has now returned to an impenetrable solitude, a voluntary nothingness.  His all-powerful hand, which has restored a dying daughter to her mother, fathers to their grief-stricken children, adored mistresses to lovers frenzied with love, cured the sick given over by physicians, soothed the sufferings of the dying when life became impossible, wrung psalms of thanksgiving in synagogues, temples, and churches from the lips of priests recalled to the one God by the same miracle,—­that sovereign hand, a sun of life dazzling the closed eyes of the somnambulist, has never been raised again even to save the heir-apparent of a kingdom.  Wrapped in the memory of his past mercies as in a luminous shroud, he denies himself to the world and lives for heaven.