CHAPTER I.
In the little woodland town of Graufthal, on the borders of the Vosges and of Alsace, there lived one of those respectable rural doctors who still wore perruques, large square-tailed coats, knee-breeches, and silver-buckled shoes.
This worthy man was named Frantz Mathéus. He inherited from his ancestors the oldest house in the place, an orchard, some arable land on the mountain, a few acres of meadow in the valley; and if you add to this modest patrimony eggs, milk, cheese, and, from time to time, a lean fowl, sent to the Doctor by the honest peasants out of the fulness of their gratitude, you will have the whole of Maître Frantz’s income: it sufficed for his maintenance and that of his old servant Martha, as well as his horse Bruno.
Maître Frantz was a curious type of the old doctores medicinæ, theologiæ or philosophiæ of the good German school. His face expressed the gentlest placidity, the most perfect good-nature; his ruling passion was metaphysics. The same pleasure which you, I imagine, might take in reading Candide or The Sentimental Journey, he experienced in meditating the Tractatus Theologico-politicus of Baruch Spinosa, or the Monadologie of Leibnitz. He also made experiments in physics and chemistry for his own amusement.
Having one day put some flour of ergot-rye into a bottle of water, he perceived, at the end of a month or two, that his rye had given birth to a number of little eels, which speedily produced a crowd of others. Mathéus, transported with enthusiasm at this discovery, at once concluded from it that if eels can be made with rye-flour, men may be made with the flour of wheat. But after reflecting more on the subject the learned Doctor thought that this transformation must be effected slowly—progressively; that from rye would come eels—from eels fish of all kinds; from these fishes, reptiles, quadrupeds, birds, and so on, up to man inclusive—the whole by virtue of the law of progress. He called this progression “the ladder of being;” and as he had studied Greek, Latin, and several other languages, he set himself to compose a magnificent work, in sixteen volumes, entitled, Palingenesis-Psychologico-Anthropo-Zoology, explaining spontaneous generation, the transformation of bodies, and the peregrination of souls; citing Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, Isis and Osiris, Thales of Miletus, Heraclitus, Democritus—in short, all the cosmological philosophers, both ancient and modern.
He sent several copies of this work to the German universities, and what was more astonishing, a good number of philosophers adopted his system; titles were conferred on him of Corresponding Member of the Surgical Institution of Prague, of the Royal Society of Sciences of Gœttingen, and of Veterinary Councillor of the Stud of Wurtzbourg.
Mathéus, encouraged by these tokens of appreciation, resolved to bring out a second edition of his Palingenesis, enriched with notes in Hebrew and Syriac in elucidation of the text.
But his old servant—a woman of great sense—represented to him that this glorious enterprise had already cost him half of all he was worth; and that he would be obliged to sell his horse, his orchard, and his meadows, to print his Syriac notes. She begged him to think a little more of mundane matters, and to moderate his anthropo-zoological ardour.
These judicious considerations greatly vexed Maître Frantz, but he could not help seeing that the good woman was right; he sighed deeply, and kept his aspirations after glory to himself.
Now all this had happened a long time ago. Mathéus had returned to his habitual mode of life; he mounted his horse early in the morning to go and visit his patients; he returned late, harassed with fatigue; in the evening, instead of shutting himself up in his library, he went down into the garden to prune his vine, to clear his trees of caterpillars, and to hoe his lettuces; after supper, Jean-Claude Wachtmann the schoolmaster, Christian the garde champêtre, and a few gossips of the neighbourhood with their spinning-wheels dropped in. They all sat round a table, and chatted about the weather, Mathéus entertaining them with news of his patients; and, at nightfall, he went tranquilly to bed, to recommence on the morrow.
Thus passed the days, months, and years. But this peaceful mode of existence could not console Maître Frantz for having missed his vocation. Often, in his distant rides, alone in the midst of the woods, he reproached himself for his fatal inaction: “Frantz,” he said to himself, “Graufthal is not the place for you! All those whom the Being of beings has made depositaries of the treasures of science belong to humanity. What will you answer to that Great Being when the time for rendering an account of yourself shall have come? Will He not say to you, in a voice of thunder: ‘Frantz Mathéus, I had gifted you with the most magnificent intelligence, I had unveiled to you things divine and human, I had destined you from the beginning of time to spread the lights of sound philosophy; where are your works? In vain for you to try to excuse yourself on the plea of its being necessary for you to attend to the sick; these vulgar duties were not made for you; others would have filled your place. Go, Frantz, go; you were not worthy of the confidence I placed in you, and I condemn you to redescend the ladder of being!’”
Sometimes even the good soul woke himself in the middle of the night with crying out, “Frantz! Frantz! you are highly culpable!”
His old servant would rush to his bedside in alarm, exclaiming—
“Good heavens! what’s the matter?”
“It is nothing—it is nothing,” Mathéus would answer; “I have had a bad dream—that’s all.”
This moral condition of the illustrious doctor could not endure for ever; the repression of his metaphysical tendencies was too severe.
One evening, as he was returning to the village along the bank of the Zinsel, he met one of those hawkers of bibles and almanacs who make their way even to the tops of the mountains to sell their wares. Maître Frantz had not lost the taste for worm-eaten books; he dismounted, and looked over the hawker’s stock. By the merest chance this one possessed a copy of the Anthropo-Zoology, which he had not been able to dispose of for fifteen years; and, seeing Mathéus regard this work with a thoroughly paternal love, he did not fail to tell him that nothing sold better than that, that everybody wanted to read this book, that no more copies were to be had, and that in consequence of this great demand the work was every day becoming more rare.
Maître Frantz’s heart beat strongly, his hand trembled.
“Oh, Great Demiourgos! Great Demiourgos!” he murmured to himself; “here I recognise thine infinite wisdom. Out of the mouths of the simple thou recallest the sages to their duties!”
Maître Frantz returned to Graufthal in a state of extreme agitation: he went about vaguely; a crowd of incoherent ideas pressed upon his mind. Should he go and live at Gœttingen? Should he go to Prague? Ought he to reprint the Palingenesis with new notes? Or ought he to apostrophise the age on its indifference to the subject of anthropo-zoology?
All this tormented, distressed him; but the means appeared to him too long, and his impatience admitting of no delay, he resolved to follow the example of the old prophets—to go forth himself into the universe and preach his own doctrine.