CHAPTER IX.
CONSIDERABLE OF A DISTURBANCE IN FONTAINEBLEAU.
It did not take long to get spread about the town that M. Martout and the Messieurs Renault, intended, in conjunction with several Paris savans, to resuscitate a dead man.
M. Martout had sent a detailed account of the case to the celebrated Karl Nibor, who had hastened to lay it before the Biological Society. A committee was forthwith appointed to accompany M. Nibor to Fontainebleau. The six commissioners and the reporter agreed to leave Paris the 15th of August,[[2]] being glad to escape the din of the public rejoicings. M. Martout was notified to get things ready for the experiment, which would probably last not less than three days.
Some of the Paris papers announced this great event among their "Miscellaneous Items," but the public paid little attention to it. The grand reception of the army returning from Italy engrossed everybody's interest, and moreover, the French do not put more than moderate faith in miracles promised in the newspapers.
But at Fontainebleau, it was an entirely different matter. Not only Monsieur Martout and the Messieurs Renault, but M. Audret, the architect, M. Bonnivet, the notary, and a dozen other of the bigwigs of the town, had seen and touched the mummy of the Colonel. They had spoken about it to their friends, had described it to the best of their ability, and had recounted its history. Two or three copies of Herr Meiser's will were circulating from hand to hand. The question of reanimations was the order of the day; they discussed it around the fish-pond, like the Academy of Sciences at a full meeting. Even in the market-place you could have heard them talking about rotifers and tardigrades.
It must be admitted that the resuscitationists were not in the majority. A few professors of the college, noted for the paradoxical character of their minds; a few lovers of the marvellous, who had been duly convicted of table-tipping; and, to top off with a half dozen of those old white-moustached grumblers who believe that the death of Napoleon I. is a calumnious lie set afloat by the English, constituted the whole of the army. M. Martout had against him not only the skeptics, but the innumerable crowd of believers, in the bargain. One party turned him to ridicule, the others proclaimed him revolutionary, dangerous, and an enemy of the fundamental ideas on which society rests. The minister of one little church preached, in inuendoes, against the Prometheuses who aspired to usurp the prerogatives of Heaven. But the rector of the parish did not hesitate to say, in five or six houses, that the cure of a man as desperately sick as M. Fougas, would be an evidence of the power and mercy of God.
The garrison of Fontainebleau was at that time composed of four squadrons of cuirassiers and the 23d regiment of the line, which had distinguished itself at Magenta. As soon as it was known in Colonel Fougas' old regiment that that illustrious officer was possibly going to return to the world, there was a general sensation. A regiment knows its history, and the history of the 23d had been that of Fougas from February, 1811, to November, 1813. All the soldiers had heard read, at their messes, the following anecdote: