ulness.

But, as he had one night confessed to her in secret, his visits were now
only visits of relief and consolation. If he had before practised with
repugnance it was because he had felt how vain was medical science.
Empiricism disheartened him. From the moment that medicine ceased to be
an experimental science and became an art, he was filled with disquiet
at the thought of the infinite variety of diseases and of their
remedies, according to the constitution of the patient. Treatment
changed with every new hypothesis; how many people, then, must the
methods now abandoned have killed! The perspicacity of the physician
became everything, the healer was only a happily endowed diviner,
himself groping in the dark and effecting cures through his fortunate
endowment. And this explained why he had given up his patients almost
altogether, after a dozen years of practise, to devote himself entirely
to study. Then, when his great labors on heredity had restored to him
for a time the hope of intervening and curing disease by his hypodermic
injections, he had become again enthusiastic, until the day when his
faith in life, after having impelled him, to aid its action in this way,
by restoring the vital forces, became still broader and gave him the
higher conviction that life was self-sufficing, that it was the only
giver of health and strength, in spite of everything. And he continued
to visit, with his tranquil smile, only those of his patients who
clamored for him loudly, and who found themselves miraculously relieved
when he injected into them only pure water.

Clotilde now sometimes allowed herself to jest about these hypodermic
injections. She was still at heart, however, a fervent worshiper of his
skill; and she said jestingly that if he performed miracles as he did it
was because he had in himself the godlike power to do so. Then he would
reply jestingly, attributing to her the efficacy of their common visits,
saying that he cured no one now when she was absent, that it was she
who brought the breath of life, the unknown and necessary force from the
Beyond. So that the rich people, the _bourgeois_, whose houses she did
not enter, continued to groan without his being able to relieve them.
And this affectionate dispute diverted them; they set out each time as
if for new discoveries, they exchanged glances of kindly intelligence
with the sick. Ah, this wretched suffering which revolted them, and
which was now all they wen