And she shewed him the answer she had obtained herself. The count could not believe it.
“Well,” said the duchess to me, “we must convince him. What shall I ask?”
“Anything your highness chooses.”
She considered for one instant, and, drawing from her pocket a small ivory box, she wrote, “Tell me why this pomatum has no longer any effect”
She formed the pyramid, the columns, and the key, as I had taught her, and as she was ready to get the answer, I told her how to make the additions and subtractions which seem to come from the numbers, but which in reality are only arbitrary; then I told her to interpret the numbers in letters, and I left the room under some pretext. I came back when I thought that she had completed her translation, and I found her wrapped in amazement.
“Ah, sir!” she exclaimed, “what an answer!”
“Perhaps it is not the right one; but that will sometimes happen, madam.”
“Not the right one, sir? It is divine! Here it is: That pomatum has no effect upon the skin of a woman who has been a mother.”
“I do not see anything extraordinary in that answer, madam.”
“Very likely, sir, but it is because you do not know that the pomatum in question was given to me five years ago by the Abbé de Brosses; it cured me at that time, but it was ten months before the birth of the Duke de Montpensier. I would give anything in the world to be thoroughly acquainted with that sublime cabalistic science.”