They explained their magnetic method of curing. Then he declaimed against magnetism—"a heap of juggleries, whose effects came only from the imagination."
However, animals are magnetised. Montacabère so states, and M. Fontaine succeeded in magnetising a lion. They had not a lion, but chance had offered them another animal.
For on the following day a ploughboy came to inform them that they were wanted up at the farm for a cow in a hopeless condition.
They hurried thither. The apple trees were in bloom, and the herbage in the farmyard was steaming under the rays of the rising sun.
At the side of a pond, half covered with a cloth, a cow was lowing, while she shivered under the pails of water that were being emptied over her body, and, enormously swollen, she looked like a hippopotamus.
Without doubt she had got "venom" while grazing amid the clover. Père Gouy and his wife were afflicted because the veterinary surgeon was not able to come, and the wheelwright who had a charm against swelling did not choose to put himself out of his way; but "these gentlemen, whose library was famous, must know the secret."
Having tucked up their sleeves, they placed themselves one in front of the horns, the other at the rump, and, with great internal efforts and frantic gesticulations, they spread wide their fingers in order to scatter streams of fluid over the animal, while the farmer, his wife, their son, and the neighbours regarded them almost with terror.
The rumblings which were heard in the cow's belly caused borborygms in the interior of her bowels. She emitted wind.
Pécuchet thereupon said: "This is an opening door for hope—an outlet, perhaps."
The outlet produced its effect: the hope gushed forth in a bundle of yellow stuff, bursting with the force of a shell. The hide got loose; the cow got rid of her swelling. An hour later there was no longer any sign of it.