“Look, Albertine,” said he, “and with me thank the chance enabling me to do a good turn for one of my brothers.”
The speaker was a green and sallow man, like one of those country clowns whom Latona’s wrath pursued and who was turning to a frog. Gilbert shuddered, thinking that he had seen this abortion before as through a sheet of blood.
He drew nearer to Sebastian and hugged him once more. But triumphing over his first impulse, he went back to the strange man who had so appalled Andrea in the second-sight vision, and said:
“Receive all the thanks of a father, sir, for having preserved his son: they are sincere and come right from his heart.”
“I have merely done my duty as prescribed by nature and recommended by science,” replied the other. “I am a man, and as Terence says, nothing human is foreign to me; besides, I have a tender heart, and cannot see even an insect suffer; consequently still less my fellow man.”
“May I learn to what fervent philanthropist I have the honor to speak?”
“Do you not know your brother-physician?” said the surgeon, laughing in what he wanted to seem benevolence though it was ghastly. “I know you, Dr. Gilbert, the friend of the American patriots, and of Lafayette!” He laid peculiar stress on this name. “The republican of America and France, the honorable Utopist who has written magnificent articles on constitutional government, which you sent to Louis XVI. from the States, and for which he lodged you in the Bastile, the moment you touched French soil. You wanted to save him by clearing the road to the future, and he opened that into jail—regular royal gratitude!”
He laughed again, this time terribly and threateningly.
“If you know me it is a farther reason for me to insist on learning to whom I am indebted.”
“Oh, it is a long while since we made acquaintance,” said the surgeon. “Twenty years, sir, on the dreadful night of the thirtieth of May, 1770; the night when the fireworks exploded by accident among the people in the Paris square, and injured and killed many who came to rejoice over the wedding of the Archduchess and our Prince Royal, but who had to curse their names. You were but a boy whom Rousseau brought to me, wounded and crushed almost to death, and I bled you on a board amid the dead and the cut-off limbs. Yet that awful night is a pleasant memory to me for I was able to save many existences by my steel knowing where to dissever to preserve life and where to cut to spare pain.”