"What is interesting about this story is not the outlandishness of these diabolical pharmacopoeia so much as the
psychology of the persons who invent and manipulate them. Think. This is happening at the present day, and it is the priests who have invented philtres unknown to the sorcerers of the Middle Ages."
"The priests, no! A priest. And what a priest!" remarked Carhaix.
"Gévingey is very precise. He affirms that others use them. Bewitchment by veniniferous blood of mice took place in 1879 at Châlons-sur-Marne in a demoniac circle—to which the canon belonged, it is true. In 1883, in Savoy, the oil of which I have spoken was prepared in a group of defrocked abbés. As you see, Docre is not the only one who practises this abominable science. It is known in the convents; some laymen, even, have an inkling of it."
"But now, admitting that these preparations are real and that they are active, you have not explained how one can poison a man with them either from a distance or near at hand."
"Yes, that's another matter. One has a choice of two methods to reach the enemy one is aiming at. The first and least used is this: the magician employs a voyant, a woman who is known in that world as 'a flying spirit'; she is a somnambulist, who, put into a hypnotic state, can betake herself, in spirit, wherever one wishes her to go. It is then possible to have her transmit the magic poisons to a person whom one designates, hundreds of leagues away. Those who are stricken in this manner have seen no one, and they go mad or die without suspecting the venefice. But these voyants are not only rare, they are also unreliable, because other persons can likewise fix them in a cataleptic state and extract confessions from them. So you see why persons like Docre have recourse to the second method, which is surer. It consists in evoking, just as in Spiritism, the soul of a dead person and sending it to strike the victim with the prepared spell. The result is the same but the vehicle is different. There," concluded Des Hermies, "reported with
painstaking exactness, are the confidences which our friend Gévingey made me this morning."
"And Dr. Johannès cures people poisoned in this manner?" asked Carhaix.
"Yes, Dr. Johannès—to my knowledge—has made inexplicable cures."
"But with what?"