"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?"
"Gévingey tells me, in this connection, that the doctor celebrates a sacrifice to the glory of Melchisedek. I haven't the faintest idea what this sacrifice is, but Gévingey will perhaps enlighten us if he returns cured."
"In spite of all, I should not be displeased, once in my life to get a good look at Canon Docre," said Durtal.
"Not I! He is the incarnation of the Accursed on earth!" cried Carhaix, assisting his friends to put on their overcoats.
He lighted his lantern, and while they were descending the stair, as Durtal complained of the cold, Des Hermies burst into a laugh.
"If your family had known the magical secrets of the plants, you would not shiver this way," he said. "It was learned in the sixteenth century that a child might be immune to heat or cold all his life if his hands were rubbed with juice of absinth before the twelfth month of his life had passed. That, you see, is a tempting prescription, less dangerous than those which Canon Docre abuses."
Once below, after Carhaix had closed the door of his tower, they hastened their steps, for the north wind swept the square.
"After all," said Des Hermies, "Satanism aside-and yet Satanism also is a phase of religion-admit that, for two miscreants of our sort, we hold singularly pious conversations. I hope they will be counted in our favour up above."
"No merit on our part," replied Durtal, "for what else is there to talk about? Conversations which do not treat of religion or art are so base and vain."
CHAPTER XV
The memory of these frightful magisteria kept racing through his head next day, and, while smoking cigarettes beside the fire, Durtal thought of Docre and Johannès fighting across Gévingey's back, smiting and parrying with incantations and exorcisms.
"In the Christian symbolism," he said to himself, "the fish is one of the representations of Christ. Doubtless the Canon thinks to aggravate his sacrileges by feeding fishes on genuine hosts. His is the reverse of the system of the mediæval witches who chose a vile beast dedicated to the Devil to submit the body of the Saviour to the processes of digestion. How real is the pretended power which the deicide chemists are alleged to wield? What faith can we put in the tales of evoked larvæ killing a designated person to order with corrosive oil and blood virus? None, unless one is extremely credulous, and even a bit mad.
"And yet, come to think of it, we find today, unexplained and surviving under other names, the mysteries which were so long reckoned the product of mediæval imagination and superstition. At the charity hospital Dr. Louis transfers maladies from one hypnotized person to another. Wherein is that less miraculous than evocation of demons, than spells cast by magicians or pastors? A larva, a flying spirit, is not, indeed, more extraordinary than a microbe coming from afar and poisoning one without one's knowledge, and the atmosphere can certainly convey spirits as well as bacilli. Certainly the ether carries, untransformed, emanations, effluences, electricity, for instance, or the fluids of a magnet which sends to a distant subject an order to traverse all Paris to rejoin it. Science has no call to contest these phenomena. On the other hand, Dr. Brown-Sequard rejuvenates infirm old men and revitalizes the impotent with distillations from the parts of rabbits and cavies. Were not the elixirs of life and the love philtres which the witches sold to the senile and impotent composed of similar or analogous substances? Human semen entered almost always, in the Middle Ages, into the compounding of these mixtures. Now, hasn't Dr. Brown-Sequard, after repeated experiments, recently demonstrated the virtues of semen taken from one man and instilled into another?
"Finally, the apparitions, doppelgänger, bilocations-to speak thus of the spirits-that terrified antiquity, have not ceased to manifest themselves. It would be difficult to prove that the experiments carried on for three years by Dr. Crookes in the presence of witnesses were cheats. If he has been able to photograph visible and tangible spectres, we must recognize the veracity of the mediæval thaumaturges. Incredible, of course-and wasn't hypnotism, possession of one soul by another which could dedicate it to crime-incredible only ten years ago?
"We are groping in shadow, that is sure. But Des Hermies hit the bull's-eye when he remarked, 'It is less important to know whether the modern pharmaceutic sacrileges are potent, than to study the motives of the Satanists and fallen priests who prepare them.'
"Ah, if there were some way of getting acquainted with Canon Docre, of insinuating oneself into his confidence, perhaps one would attain clear insight into these questions. I learned long ago that there are no people interesting to know except saints, scoundrels, and cranks. They are the only persons whose conversation amounts to anything. Persons of good sense are necessarily dull, because they revolve over and over again the tedious topics of everyday life. They are the crowd, more or less intelligent, but they are the crowd, and they give me a pain. Yes, but who will put me in touch with this monstrous priest?" and, as he poked the fire, Durtal said to himself, "Chantelouve, if he would, but he won't. There remains his wife, who used to be well acquainted with Docre. I must interrogate her and find out whether she still corresponds with him and sees him."
The entrance of Mme. Chantelouve into his reflections saddened him. He took out his watch and murmured, "What a bore. She will come again, and again I shall have to-if only there were any possibility of convincing her of the futility of the carnal somersaults! In any case, she can't be very well pleased, because, to her frantic letter soliciting a meeting, I responded three days later by a brief, dry note, inviting her to come here this evening. It certainly was lacking in lyricism, too much so, perhaps."