“I am—I am hungry,” stammered Cocoleu.
M. Folgat looked indignant.
“And to think,” he said, “that, upon the testimony of such a thing, a capital charge has been made!”
Grandpapa Chandore seemed to be seriously embarrassed. He said,—
“But now, what in the world are we to do with the idiot?”
“I am going to take him,” said M. Seneschal, “to the hospital. I will go with him myself, and let Dr. Seignebos know, and the commonwealth attorney.”
Dr. Seignebos was an eccentric man, beyond doubt; and the absurd stories which his enemies attributed to him were not all unfounded. But he had, at all events, the rare quality of professing for his art, as he called it, a respect very nearly akin to enthusiasm. According to his views, the faculty were infallible, as much so as the pope, whom he denied. He would, to be sure, in confidence, admit that some of his colleagues were amazing donkeys; but he would never have allowed any one else to say so in his presence. From the moment that a man possessed the famous diploma which gives him the right over life and death, that man became in his eyes an august personage for the world at large. It was a crime, he thought, not to submit blindly to the decision of a physician. Hence his obstinacy in opposing M. Galpin, hence the bitterness of his contradictions, and the rudeness with which he had requested the “gentlemen of the law” to leave the room in which his patient was lying.
“For these devils,” he said, “would kill one man in order to get the means of cutting off another man’s head.”
And thereupon, resuming his probes and his sponge, he had gone to work once more, with the aid of the countess, digging out grain by grain the lead which had honeycombed the flesh of the count. At nine o’clock the work was done.
“Not that I fancy I have gotten them all out,” he said modestly, “but, if there is any thing left, it is out of reach, and I shall have to wait for certain symptoms which will tell me where they are.”