When he had swallowed about a foot and a half of it, the doctor said: "We are at the bottom. Turn it on!"
The attendant thereupon turned on the cock, and soon the patient's stomach became visibly swollen, having been filled up gradually with the warm water of the spring.
"Cough," said the physician, "cough, in order to facilitate the descent."
In place of coughing, the poor man had a rattling in the throat, and shaken with convulsions, he looked as if his eyes were going to jump out of his head.
Then suddenly a light gurgling could be heard on the ground close to the armchair. The spout of the tube with the two passages had at last begun to work; and the stomach now emptied itself into this glass receiver where the doctor searched eagerly for the indications of catarrh and the recognizable traces of imperfect digestion.
"You are not to eat any more green peas," said he, "or salad. Oh! no salad! You cannot digest it at all. No more strawberries either! I have already repeated to you ten times, no strawberries!"
M. Riquier seemed raging with anger. He excited himself now without being able to utter a word on account of this tube, which stopped up his throat. But when, the washing having been finished, the doctor had delicately drawn out the probe from his interior, he exclaimed:
"Is it my fault if I am eating every day filth that ruins my health? Isn't it you that should watch the meals supplied by your hotel-keeper? I have come to your new cook-shop because they used to poison me at the old one with abominable food, and I am worse than ever in your big barrack of a Mont Oriol inn, upon my honor!"
The doctor had to appease him, and promised over and over again to have the invalids' food at the table d'hôte submitted beforehand to his inspection. Then, he took Paul Bretigny's arm again, and said as he led him away:
"Here are the extremely rational principles on which I have established my special treatment by the self-moving gymnastics, which we are going to inspect. You know my system of organometric medicine, don't you? I maintain that a great portion of our maladies entirely proceed from the excessive development of some one organ which encroaches on a neighboring organ, impedes its functions, and, in a little while, destroys the general harmony of the body, whence arise the most serious disturbances.