“The aid-de-camp spoke the truth; nevertheless he made a mistake of five minutes; for at the end of five minutes only, the canon raised the reliquary aloft, exclaiming, Il miracolo è fatto. The blood was completely liquefied.”
We suppose we may take these as the best versions of the same story.
The other French and late English versions we have met of it, however they may vary in minor details, all agree as to the person—General Championnet, and as to the year, 1799. So far as we can judge, the Siècle and the other writers got their facts from the novelist. It is their way. When they attack religion, all manner of weapons are acceptable. Where the novelist got it we need scarcely inquire. Certainly, on a pinch, he was capable of inventing it out of the whole cloth. But we can only credit him with twisting and reversing an older story. In a work entitled Naples and Campagna Felice, printed in London in 1815, there is an earlier account of “the very recent experiment of General Championnet.”
“When this Champion of liberty entered Naples with his unhosed enfans de la patrie, his curiosity, or rather his infidelity, prompted him to direct the priests forthwith to perform the ceremony before him and his companions, the philosophic worshippers of the Goddess of Reason.... ‘The miracle must be exhibited this instant, or I’ll smash your vials and all your nonsense into a thousand pieces.’... Every devout effort of the priests proved vain; even the general’s active assistance and repeated trials to give fluidity to the indurated blood, by means of natural and artificial heat, were equally unsuccessful.”
This want of success, according to, the teller of the story, was due to the fact that the relatives of St. Januarius were not present. The general sent soldiers to arrest them, and had them brought into the church.
“A second experiment was now instituted in due form: which, to the utter amazement of the French part of the congregation, and to the inward delight of all the pious Neapolitans, succeeded almost instantaneously.”
Were it not for the identity of names and place, we could scarcely
recognize this earlier English version, with its characteristic contempt of French philosophers and enfans de la patrie, and its result of the experiment so satisfactory to the Neapolitans, as in reality the original form of the story, which Dumas, and after him many others, have dressed up and presented to the world with such different details, and with a result exactly opposite.
But a regard for truth obliges us to reject this earlier form, no less than those which followed, as, all of them, pure fictions. The evidence is clear and to the point.
I. On May 4,1799, General Championnet was not in Naples. He had entered that city with his army on the 28th of January preceding, and had established “The Parthenopean Republic”; but he had been relieved of his command before May; possibly on account of ill health, for he died at Antibes a few months later. His successor in the command at Naples was General, afterwards Marshal Macdonald.