XVIII
Once more, the Marquis Gaspard drew his snuff-box and opened it. But this time he did not close it again. He held it wide open in the palm of his hand without taking his pinch of snuff.
“Monsieur,” he resumed, “I am far from being a philosopher. On the subject of metaphysics I am quite as unpretentious as you. Nevertheless, you and I know as much assuredly as any man in France about the real nature of that undefinable thing called Life. I say ‘as much,’ though I might well say ‘as little’; for no one ever has known, or ever will know, anything really about Life. At the very most we are at liberty to guess at a few of the phenomena which accompany the existence of living beings on earth and which disappear on the advent of Death. My master, the Count of Saint Germain, never deluded himself on this point. Once he discovered the path we may follow with security, he contented himself with not departing from it by an inch, though the path itself he traversed in Seven League Boots, one might say, burning a very long candle at both ends! In his case, there was not, as commonplace minds have stupidly imagined, any trace of sorcery or magic. With him it was a matter of solid science, acquired by patient experiment—a matter of mentality, of genius, if you will—nothing more, nothing less, than that. The Secret, the Truth which he discovered, and which he bequeathed to me when he had tired of using it, the Secret of Long Life, the Secret of Never Dying—is a purely natural, a purely scientific affair. You yourself can be judge, Monsieur le capitaine.
“Not that I shall pretend to explain, to demonstrate, this Secret to you with the rigor mathematicians and physicists require in their sciences. My master might have presumed so much. For myself, I feel quite too ignorant even to venture on such a task. But, after all, what does that matter? All you want to know is what your friend, Madame Madeleine de X...., has to do with it. Am I not right, Monsieur?
“Very well, Sir! To the point! We, Monsieur le capitaine, you, I, all of us, considered as living beings, are compounds of elements, so many bundles of atoms, or cells, which latter come to life in us, live their lives, and die, to be replaced, in the end, by other similar elements engendered of those before them. Trustworthy scientists have declared that the bodies we have today do not contain a single particle of the substances of which they were composed ten years ago. This incessant transformation, this constant renewal of ourselves, constitutes one of the distinctive traits of the Life to which I referred a moment since.
“This reconstruction, however, does not take place in the same way in every creature, nor in the same way at all periods in one individual existence. When a child grows, for example, each old atom is replaced by several new ones. In old age, on the contrary, many atoms disappear while only a few successors take their places. Death occurs when the departing elements are no longer replaced at all.
“Monsieur le capitaine, this was the special fact which arrested my master’s attention, and meditation on which revealed to him in the end the Secret I have the honor to be discussing with you—instead of sleeping, as I might normally and reasonably be doing, in some coffin already rotted from the years. And this Secret....
“I will reveal it to you, Sir, and without flinching, dangerous as that may be. You, Monsieur, must I again remind you, are in a position to ask anything of us and always be contented—anything save one thing, of course; but this one thing is not the Secret. So then....