Gentlemen, let us put all these personal attacks aside, all these recriminations against science and its agents, who unfortunately had not succeeded in restoring the health of the morose magistrate.  What remains then of his pamphlet?  Two chapters, only two chapters, in which Bailly’s report is treated seriously.  The medical commissioners and the members of the Academy had not seen, in the real effects of Mesmerism anything more than was occasioned by imagination.  The celebrated magistrate exclaims on this subject, “Any one hearing this proposition spoken of would suppose, before reading the report, that the commissioners had treated and cured, or considerably relieved by the force of imagination, large tumours, inveterate obstructions, gutta serenas, and strong paralyses.”  Servan admitted, in short, that magnetism had effected most wonderful cures.  But there lay all the question.  The cures being admitted, the rest followed as a matter of course.

However incredible these cures might be, they must be admitted, they said, when numerous witnesses certified their truth.  Was it owing to chance that attestations were wanting for the miracles at the Cemetery of St. Medard?  Did not the counsellor to the parliament, Montgeron, state, in three large quarto volumes, the names of a great multitude of individuals who protested on their honour as illuminati, that the tomb of the Deacon, Paris, had restored sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, strength to the paralytic; that in a twinkling it cured ailing people of gouty rheumatism, of dropsy, of epilepsy, of phthisis, of abscesses, of ulcers, &c.?  Did these attestations, although many emanated from persons of distinction, from the Chevalier Folard, for example, prevent the convulsionists from becoming the laughingstock of Europe?  Did they not see the Duchess of Maine herself laugh at their prowess in the following witty couplet?—­

     “A scavenger at the palace-gate
       Who, his left heel being lame,
     Obtained as a most special grace,
       That his right should ail the same."[9]

Was not government, urged to the utmost, at last obliged to interfere, when the multitude, carrying folly to the extremest bounds, was going to try to resuscitate the dead?  In short, do we not remember the amusing distich, affixed at the time to the gate of the Cemetery of St. Medard?—­

     “By royal decree, we prohibit the gods
     To work any miracles near to these sods."[10]

Servan must have known better than any one that in regard to testimony, and in questions of complex facts, quality always carries the day over mere numbers; let us add, that quality does not result either from titles of nobility, or from riches, nor from the social position, nor even from a certain sort of celebrity.  What we must seek for in a witness is a calmness of mind and of feeling, a store of knowledge, and a very rare thing, notwithstanding the name it bears, common sense; on the other hand, what we must most avoid is the innate taste of some persons for the extraordinary, the wonderful, the paradoxical.  Servan did not at all recollect these precepts in the criticism he wrote on Bailly’s work.