“4. Then, getting further away from man, vegetables have considerable plastic force.
“Such, reduced to its simplest expression, is the summary of the situation in the presence of which I found myself, and on which I staked all.
“I came here to work more comfortably, and almost immediately I performed remarkable operations, which became very famous. One more especially. I wonder if you remember it?
“X, the Pickle-King, the American millionaire, had only one ear, and desired to have a pair of them. A poor devil sold him one of his for five thousand dollars. I performed the little ceremony. The grafted ear only died with X two years later, when he succumbed to indigestion.
“It was then, when the world was applauding my triumph, and just as the very moment when love, having come on the scene, was urging me to make money, in order that Emma should live a life of luxury—it was just then that I conceived my great idea, which proceeded from this reasoning:
“If a millionaire, dissatisfied with his physique, pays five thousand dollars for the pleasure of embellishing it a little, what would he not give for changing it altogether, and acquire a new body for his ego, for his brain—a covering full of grace, vigor and youth, in place of an old sickly and repulsive casing!
“On the other hand, how many beggars I know would give up their magnificent anatomy for a few years of jollification!
“And observe, Nicolas, this purchase of a young body would not only furnish advantages of suppleness, warmth and endurance, but also the enormous advantage that in a youthful milieu, the transferred organs are rejuvenated.
“Oh! I am not the first to advance this theory, and Paul Bert, admitted the possibility of grafting an organ on several consecutive bodies, as each of these latter grow old, so that by a series of rejuvenations, he foresaw that one might make the same stomach, the same brain live indefinitely—as an integral part of successive constitutions. This was tantamount to declaring that a personality can live indefinitely, by a series of incarnations, in a journey through different carcasses, each discarded at the proper moment.
“The discovery to be made surpassed my hopes. I was not only pursuing the choice of a pleasing outward appearance—I had my hand on the secret of IMMORTALITY!