THE
ILLUSTRIOUS DR. MATHÉUS.
BY
MM. ERCKMANN-CHATRIAN,
Authors of “Madame Thérèse,” “The Conscript,” “The Blockade,”
“Waterloo,” “The Story of a Peasant,” &c.
LONDON:
WARD, LOCK, AND, TYLER,
WARWICK HOUSE, PATERNOSTER ROW.
THE
ILLUSTRIOUS DR. MATHÉUS.
CHAPTER I.
In the little woodland town of Graufthal, on the borders of the Vosges and of Alsace, there lived one of those respectable rural doctors who still wore perruques, large square-tailed coats, knee-breeches, and silver-buckled shoes.
This worthy man was named Frantz Mathéus. He inherited from his ancestors the oldest house in the place, an orchard, some arable land on the mountain, a few acres of meadow in the valley; and if you add to this modest patrimony eggs, milk, cheese, and, from time to time, a lean fowl, sent to the Doctor by the honest peasants out of the fulness of their gratitude, you will have the whole of Maître Frantz’s income: it sufficed for his maintenance and that of his old servant Martha, as well as his horse Bruno.
Maître Frantz was a curious type of the old doctores medicinæ, theologiæ or philosophiæ of the good German school. His face expressed the gentlest placidity, the most perfect good-nature; his ruling passion was metaphysics. The same pleasure which you, I imagine, might take in reading Candide or The Sentimental Journey, he experienced in meditating the Tractatus Theologico-politicus of Baruch Spinosa, or the Monadologie of Leibnitz. He also made experiments in physics and chemistry for his own amusement.