A Frenchman rescued from the hands of the Inquisition the last manuscripts of Galileo. A Frenchman also—Thévenot—supported Swammerdam with his purse and credit. He was desirous of establishing him at Paris. On the other hand, the Grand-Duke of Tuscany invited him to Florence. But the fate of Galileo was too strong a warning. Even in France there was little safety. The mystic Morin was burned at Paris in 1664; the very year in which Molière performed the first acts of his "Tartuffe." Swammerdam, who was then residing there, might have been present at both spectacles.
He himself, notwithstanding his positivism, showed very singular tendencies towards mysticism. The more deeply he entered into details, the more eagerly did he long to reascend to the general source of love and life; an impotent effort which consumed him. Already, at the age of thirty-two, excessive toil, chagrin, and religious melancholy brought him to the grave. From his early years he had suffered from the fevers so common in Holland, that land of swamp and morass, and had not paid due attention to them. He studied with his microscope every day from dawn till noon; the remainder of the day he wrote. And for his studies he preferred the summer days, with their strong light and burning sunshine. Then he would remain, with his head bare that he might not lose the smallest ray, frequently until deluged and bathed in sweat. His eyesight grew very weak.
He was already in a feeble condition when, in 1669, he published in a preliminary essay the principle of the metamorphosis of insects. He was sure of being immortal; but so much the more in danger of dying of hunger. His father thenceforth withdrew from him all assistance. Swammerdam by his discoveries (as of the lymphatic vessels and hernias) had very considerably promoted the progress of medicine, and even of surgery; but he was not a physician. From a spirit of obedience he had attempted to practise: he could not continue, and fell ill. He was now without a home. His father shut up his house, retired to live with his son-in-law, and bade Swammerdam provide for himself, and lodge where he would. A wealthy friend had often solicited him to reside with him. When expelled from the paternal roof, he made an effort to seek out this friend and remind him of his offer; but he remembered it no longer.
Misfortunes now accumulated upon his head. Poor and infirm, and dragging himself along the streets of Amsterdam with a large collection which he knew not where to store away, he received another terrible shock—the ruin of his country. The earth sunk under his feet.
It was the fatal year of 1672, when Holland seemed crushed by the invasion of Louis XIV. Assuredly his fatherland had not spoiled Swammerdam; but nevertheless it was the native home of science, of free reason, the asylum of human thought. And lo! she sank, engulfed by the hosts of the French; engulfed in the ocean which she had summoned to her assistance. She lived only by committing suicide. Did she live? Yes; but to be thenceforth no more than the shadow of her former greatness.
The infinite melancholy of such a change has had its painter and its poet in Ruysdaël, who was born and who died in Swammerdam's time, and, like him, at the age of forty. When I contemplate in the Louvre the inestimable picture which that Museum possesses of him, the one leads me to think of the other. The little man who followed the gloomy route of the dunes at the approach of the storm reminds me of my insect-hunter; and the sublime marine picture of the palisade in the red-brown waters, chafing so terribly, and electrified by the tempest, seems a dramatic expression of the moral tempests which poor Swammerdam experienced when he wrote "The Ephemera"—"among tears and sobs."
The Ephemera is the fly which is born but to die, living a single hour of love.
But Swammerdam did not enjoy that hour; and it seems as if he spent his too brief life in a state of complete isolation. At the age of thirty-six he was already drawing near his end. The depths of imagination and universal tenderness in his nature could not be alimented by the barren controversies of the age. In this condition there accidentally fell into his hand an unknown work,—a woman's book. This sweet voice spoke to his very soul, and somewhat consoled him. It was one of the opuscula of a celebrated mystic of that age, Mademoiselle Bourignon.