"For you can send people to sleep," she pursued: "you no doubt have studied magnetism with those villains who make slumber a treacherous weapon and read our secrets in our sleep."
"Indeed, madam, I have studied magnetism under the wise Cagliostro."
"That teacher of moral theft, who taught his disciples how to rifle bodies and souls by his infamous practice!"
Gilbert understood all by this, and she shuddered with joy to the core at seeing him lose color.
"Wretch," she rejoiced, "I have stung him to the quick and the blood flows."
But the deepest emotions did not long hold the mesmerizer in their spell. Approaching the Queen who was rash enough to look up in her triumph and let her eyes be caught, he said:
"You are wrong to judge fellow-creatures so harshly. You denounce Cagliostro as a quack when you had a proof of his real science; when you were the Archduchess of Austria and first came to France. When I saw you at Taverney, did not that wonder-worker whom you decry show to your Majesty in a clear cup of water such a picture of your fate that you swooned away?"
Gilbert had not seen the forecast, but he knew from his master, no doubt, what Marie Antoinette had been shown. He struck so hard that she turned dreadfully pale.
"Yes," she said in a hoarse voice, "he showed me a hideous machine of bloodshed. But I do not yet know that such a thing exists."
"I know not that, but he cannot be denied the rank of sage who held such might over his fellow-beings."