CHAPTER XXI.
THE DEAD-HOUSE OF THE HÔTEL DIEU, AND THE ORGY AT THE HÔTEL DE CLUNY
The autumn passed away, and winter came on in all its severity. The trees in the gardens of the Tuileries and the Palais d’Orleans, where the parterres and avenues of the Luxembourg are now situated, rose naked and dreary towards the dull sky; and the snow lay deep upon the Butte St. Roche, uncarted and uncared for, threatening to inundate the lower streets in the vicinity when the thaw came. The public places, too, lost their air of life and business. The mountebanks, showmen, and dentists ceased to pitch their platforms on the Pont Neuf and Carrefour du Châtelet; for although they were individuals inured to cold, yet they found the promenaders were more sensitive, and would not stop to listen to their harangues. The women were less attractive to the passing glance of the cavaliers in the streets, or the still mundane fathers in the churches. No more white shoulders, covered only by the rippling curls of the period, flashed in the afternoon sunlight—no more dazzling throats captured the hearts and the purses of the susceptible young gallants of the patrician quartiers, or whatever qualities supplied the perfect absence of either in the scholars of Cluny, Mazarin, and the Hôtel Dieu, attached to the Pays Latin. Sometimes an hour or two of warm sunlight brought the gossipers out in the middle of the day to their old haunts; elsewise they preferred assembling in the shops of the most approved retailers of passing scandal, and there canvassing the advantages or demerits of the different characters, or the probable results of the various politics, then mostly talked of in the good city of Paris.
The shop of Maître Glazer, the apothecary of the Place Maubert, was the most favoured resort of the idle bourgeois. They loved it in the summer, when the pure air came through the open front of the window to dilute the atmosphere of cunning remedies that filled it, and it appeared to have the same charm in the winter, although closely shut; perhaps from the idea, with some, that the inhalation of the air laden with such marvellous odours of chemicals and galenicals would have all the effect of swallowing the things themselves, and on a cheaper and less noxious plan.
But, in truth, the shop of Maître Glazer possessed various advantages over others as a lounge for the gossipers. In his quality of apothecary he was admitted to the councils, arrangements, and disputes of all the families in the neighbourhood; and not wishing to favour one more than another, he very properly retailed them in a circle from one to the other, which made his society much sought after; indeed, he was suspected of being sent for sometimes when the indisposition was a mere pretext for conversing a quarter of an hour with the apothecary, at such times as the supposed invalid was dying—not in the common acceptance of the word, but to be satisfied with regard to any point deeply affecting some neighbour; and as the cure in these cases was always very rapid, Maître Glazer got fresh honour thereby.
But just at present matters of deeper moment attracted the idlers to his shop than the discussion of mere domestic affairs. We have said that his reputation stood well in Paris as a talented compounder of antidotes to poisons; and the still increasing number of mysterious deaths in the city and faubourgs, which so entirely baffled all medical or surgical art, either to arrest the progress of the disease or discover its source—although they were all attributed to the working of poison—provided subjects for conversation in the mouths of everybody. The terrible episode which formed so fearful a characteristic of the moral state of the reign of Louis XIV., was now talked of publicly and generally, until the topic increasing led, but a very few years after the period of our story, to the establishment of the Chambre des Poisons, ordained by order of the King to inquire into the deeds of the poisoners and magicians then practising in Paris, and punish them if the accusations were brought home.
Maître Glazer was in his shop, and so was his son Philippe, together with Maître Picard, Jean Blacquart the Gascon, and one or two of the bourgeois neighbours, talking over the events of the day. Panurge was compounding medicines at his usual post, and endeavouring to outlie the Gascon, according to custom; and sometimes their controversies ran so high that they were only quieted when Philippe threatened to thrash them both at once, or beat every atom of flesh from Panurge’s bones, which, looking to his miserable condition, was certainly not a process of any very great labour.
‘I do not believe in all these stories,’ said Philippe; ‘they frighten the city, but not our profession. I admit that there is a grievous epidemic about, but the same symptoms attack those who die in and out of our hospital.’
‘Are the symptoms the same?’ asked a neighbour.
‘Precisely,’ replied Philippe: ‘there is the same wasting away of body and spirits; the same fluttering pulse and fevered system; the same low, crushing weariness of mind, until all is over. One would imagine, if all were true, that the poisoners were in the very heart of the Hôtel Dieu.’
‘I must have taken some myself,’ said Maître Picard. ‘My spirits sink, and I have a constant thirst; my pulse flutters too, wonderfully, albeit my body does not waste.’