“What of that, sir?” said Doctor T——: “really, Sir John, I can stay no longer.”
“You have much ordinary professional practice,” said the baronet—“I mean exclusive of your noble patients in Rue Rivoli, &c.—visits, for instance, to the Boulevard St. Martin, St. Antoine, Place de Bastile, De Bourse, &c., which you know are principally peopled by brokers with aspiring families; rich négocians, with ambitious daughters, &c., who, if they were to give five hundred thousand francs, can’t get into one fashionable soirée for want of a touch of gentility—not even within smell of sweet little Berry’s[[12]] under nursery-maids. Now,” said Sir John, pausing a moment, “we’re at the point.”
[12]. Sir John is the greatest eulogist of the Duchess of Berry, and has got the Legion of Honour for having given up his bed, blankets, and all, to the Duke of Berry, somewhere on the road, when they were both running away from Napoleon Bonaparte.
“So much the better,” said the man of medicine.
“I understand that there is a member of the faculty in Paris, who undertakes the transfusion of blood with miraculous success, and has not only demonstrated its practicability, but insists that it may by improvement be rendered sufficiently operative to harmonise and amalgamate the different qualities of different species of animals. I am told he does not yet despair of seeing, by transfusion of blood, horses becoming the best mousers, cats setting partridges, and the vulgarest fellows upon earth metamorphosed into gentlemen.”
“Pshaw! pshaw!” exclaimed Doctor T——.
“Now, I perceive no reason,” resumed Sir John, “why any man should perform such an operation better than yourself: and if you advertise in the Petit Avis that you have a quantity of genuine Glinsk O’Bourke gore always at command, to transfuse into persons who wish to acquire the gentilities and the feelings of noblesse, without pain or patent, my blood, fresh from the veins, would bring you at least a Nap a spoonful: and in particular proportions, would so refine and purify the vulgar puddle of the bourgeois, that they might soon be regarded (in conjunction with their money) as high at least as the half-starved quatrième nobility, who hobble down to their sugar and water at soirées in the fauxbourg St. Germain, and go to bed in the dark to save candle-light.”
The doctor felt hurt beyond all endurance: he blushed up to his very whiskers, sealed his lips hermetically—by a sardonic smile only disclosing one of his dog-teeth, and endeavoured to depart: but the button was still fast between Sir John’s fingers, who begged of his victim not to spare his veins, saying, “that he would with pleasure stand as much phlebotomy as would make a fortune for any reasonable practitioner.”