Suddenly the Marquis Gaspard spoke up anew:
“Monsieur le capitaine, I am inclined to suppose that now your curiosity is satisfied; but should there remain some shadow of doubt in your mind still, should there be any point I have not yet made entirely clear, please consider me at your disposal quite. In my opinion—I know it is but a humble one—it were best all around that we understand each other perfectly, leaving nothing, absolutely nothing, in the dark. You will be patient, therefore, if I supplement my recent explanation with a few observations in detail—and kindly pardon me, if I seem to do all the talking. For that matter, I do not insist. You may be bored insufferably for instance. In that event you are quite at liberty to make your escape—you might go to bed again, for one thing. The narrative I have just completed seemed to me essential to an accurate understanding of the facts. On the other hand, what I was minded to tell you now is not wholly indispensable. I should not be in the least offended if you thought best not to hear it....
“To proceed then, Madame Madeleine de X...., a friend of yours, is here, as you now know, to work, with the best of her soul and body, for our benefit; and specifically for the purpose of renewing, of rejuvenating, the physical substance of us three. Now I know how you love this lady; and I am quite ready to assume that you would be interested in hearing more of the marvelous things she does for us, and for which we are indeed her debtors. I should feel remiss in concealing anything on such a delicate matter.
“Monsieur le capitaine, I shall not inflict upon you a review I might make—dull, dry, wearisome it would almost certainly be—of the efforts men—and by men, I mean physicians more particularly—have made to transfuse a life that is young into bodies that are old. I use the word ‘transfuse,’ my mind reverting to a crude experiment resorted to from time to time (with no success worth mentioning) and which consists in a simple transfer of blood from a strong man to a weaker one. Folderol! Balderdash! Charlatanry! What else could you expect from doctors of medicine, so called? Among donkeys your physician is the prize ass! And I cannot understand how your age, Monsieur le capitaine, the Twentieth Century of Our Lord’s era, can take so seriously these fakirs who, in my time, I assure you, were appraised at a far juster worth.
“That, however, is beside the point. I need not remind you—you must surely have guessed as much yourself—that my master made no use of medical devices in arriving at his astonishing results. His pride it was to be a chemist, not to say an alchemist, as he would have said. He was no mere horse-doctor. He was no mere barber. His discerning eye was fixed on the mysterious depths of the test-tube, not on the point of a brutal butcher-knife. And he discovered....
“Just when, I do not know. It is well authenticated that the Count de Saint Germain lived several centuries, a fact explainable only on the assumption that the Secret of Long Life must be of very ancient origin. I stress this fact, for the glory of my master is but enhanced thereby. Our Secret, indeed, has a number of curious analogies with the electric or magnetic appliances the invention of which is the glory of the present age. Just consider then how far ahead of his time this great man was! But in speaking of electricity I am not, believe me, thinking of the primitive tricks that were known even to men of old. No, my master did not waste his time in drawing sparks from a cat’s tail nor in making bull-frogs dance to music. But he did manipulate the philosopher’s stone most handily, and he was able to dispense with mercury when he chose to plate with silver or with gold. I remember that many a time, just in play one might say, he would amuse us by transferring the metal of one object to the surface of another object of a different metal; and this he did by means of electric batteries, of which, precisely, he was an independent inventor; though he used other processes still, quite as far from being supernatural as they were kindred to the marvelous. But he did not stop at so little, for these things were mere child’s play to him. I saw him, with my own eyes, one day, take a branch from a rose-bush with two roses on it and one bud, not to mention the leaves, and transport the whole in some mysterious way through a thick partition, in which the doors were sealed, into an adjoining room. Little by little the rose-branch wasted away before our eyes and as gradually reassembled in another place. That experiment impressed me, I can tell you, Sir; though the Count assured me there was nothing very remarkable about it, since any substance could be disintegrated for a certain short length of time into incredibly minute atoms which made light of passing through such coarsely textured obstacles as wooden doors, or brick and plaster walls. ‘The time will come,’ he used to say, ‘when matter and movement, which, moreover, are identical, can be exteriorized, much as smells, sounds, or light are normally at present.’
“It would be scant flattery to your acumen, Monsieur le capitaine, were I now to fear you had not guessed the general method of our Secret. Just as a mass of pure gold, suitably moistened in an appropriate liquid and acted upon by a current from an electric battery of an appropriate force, may be broken up and distributed toward a mass of plain iron so placed as to be receptive of such action, so a living creature, likewise placed in a favorable environment and subjected to a magnetic energy of proper strength, gives up its cells in certain numbers and transmits them to another living creature stationed at a point where they may be received and assimilated. There, Monsieur le capitaine, you have our ‘process’—if I may borrow a term from the jargon of your modern alchemists.
“You must be aware by this time, Sir, that I am seeking to hide nothing from you, that I come down indeed to very perilous details. I will go even so far as to add that the conditions favorable for this operation may be found in any room whatever, provided such room be tightly closed, perfectly silent, and darkened to a half light; and provided also, it be laid on a line from North to South. This latter specification is necessary in order to keep at sufficient tension (by drawing on the magnetic forces of the Earth itself) the magnetic current which, for its part, any strong and wilful man can find in his own physical being when he so pleases.
“Now, Monsieur le capitaine, I dare hope you have been furnished with all the facts that you desired to know?”