“When I first settled here, sir, I found a dozen cretins in this part of the canton,” and the doctor turned round to point out the ruined cottages for the officer’s benefit.  “All the favorable conditions for spreading the hideous disease are there; the air is stagnant, the hamlet lies in the valley bottom, close beside a torrent supplied with water by the melted snows, and the sunlight only falls on the mountain-top, so that the valley itself gets no good of the sun.  Marriages among these unfortunate creatures are not forbidden by law, and in this district they are protected by superstitious notions, of whose power I had no conception—­superstitions which I blamed at first, and afterwards came to admire.  So cretinism was in a fair way to spread all over the valley from this spot.  Was it not doing the country a great service to put a stop to this mental and physical contagion?  But imperatively as the salutary changes were required, they might cost the life of any man who endeavored to bring them about.  Here, as in other social spheres, if any good is to be done, we come into collision not merely with vested interests, but with something far more dangerous to meddle with—­religious ideas crystallized into superstitions, the most permanent form taken by human thought.  I feared nothing.

“In the first place, I sought for the position of mayor in the canton, and in this I succeeded.  Then, after obtaining a verbal sanction from the prefect, and by paying down the money, I had several of these unfortunate creatures transported over to Aiguebelle, in Savoy, by night.  There are a great many of them there, and they were certain to be very kindly treated.  When this act of humanity came to be known, the whole countryside looked upon me as a monster.  The cure preached against me.  In spite of all the pains I took to explain to all the shrewder heads of the little place the immense importance of being rid of the idiots, and in spite of the fact that I gave my services gratuitously to the sick people of the district, a shot was fired at me from the corner of a wood.

“I went to the Bishop of Grenoble and asked him to change the cure.  Monseigneur was good enough to allow me to choose a priest who would share in my labors, and it was my happy fortune to meet with one of those rare natures that seemed to have dropped down from heaven.  Then I went on with my enterprise.  After preparing people’s minds, I made another transportation by night, and six more cretins were taken away.  In this second attempt I had the support of several people to whom I had rendered some service, and I was backed by the members of the Communal Council, for I had appealed to their parsimonious instincts, showing them how much it cost to support the poor wretches, and pointing out how largely they might gain by converting their plots of ground (to which the idiots had no proper title) into allotments which were needed in the township.