yes. "I warn you not to look at anything but the wretched
woman on whom you are now to exercise your skill; if you do, I'll fling
you into the river that flows beneath those windows, with a collar round
your neck weighing a hundred pounds!"

With that, he pulled down upon the breast of his stupefied hearer the
cravat with which his eyes had been bandaged.

"Examine first if this can be a miscarriage," he continued; "in which
case your life will answer to me for the mother's; but, if the child is
living, you are to bring it to me."

So saying, the count seized the poor operator by the body and placed him
before the countess, then he went himself to the depths of a bay-window
and began to drum with his fingers upon the panes, casting glances
alternately on his serving-man, on the bed, and at the ocean, as if he
were pledging to the expected child a cradle in the waves.

The man whom, with outrageous violence, the count and Bertrand had
snatched from his bed and fastened to the crupper of the latter's
horse, was a personage whose individuality may serve to characterize the
period,--a man, moreover, whose influence was destined to make itself
felt in the house of Herouville.

Never in any age were the nobles so little informed as to natural
science, and never was judicial astrology held in greater honor; for
at no period in history was there a greater general desire to know
the future. This ignorance and this curiosity had led to the utmost
confusion in human knowledge; all things were still mere personal
experience; the nomenclatures of theory did not exist; printing was done
at enormous cost; scientific communication had little or no facility;
the Church persecuted science and all research which was based on the
analysis of natural phenomena. Persecution begat mystery. So, to the
people as well as to the nobles, physician and alchemist, mathematician
and astronomer, astrologer and necromancer were six attributes, all
meeting in the single person of the physician. In those days a superior
physician was supposed to be cultivating magic; while curing his patient
he was drawing their horoscopes. Princes protected the men of genius who
were willing to reveal the future; they lodged them in their palaces
and pensioned them. The famous Cornelius Agrippa, who came to France
to become the physician of Henri II., would not consent, as Nostradamus
did, to predict the future, and for this reason he was dismissed by
Catherine de'