uppose I had asked the same service from three men, and that each
had answered me with the single word _yes_, accompanied by a gesture of
the hand. If one of them had let his thumb approach the forefinger, it
is plain to me that he would deceive me, for his thumb thus placed tells
me that he is dead to my proposition.

If I observe in the second a slight abduction of the thumb, I must
believe that he, although indisposed to oblige me, will still do so from
submission.

But if the third abducts his thumb forcibly from the other fingers, oh!
I can count on him, he will not deceive me! The abduction of his thumb
tells me more in regard to his loyalty than all the assurances which he
might give me.

Behold, then, an intuition whose correctness the experience of forty
years has not contradicted.

It is hard to imagine the joy I felt at my discovery produced and
verified in a single day by so many examples, differing so greatly one
from another and of such diverse interest.

All the emotions of this extraordinary and fertile day had so
over-excited my imagination that I had great difficulty in calming my
poor brain, and far from being able to enjoy the rest which I so much
needed, I was a prey to wakefulness in which the turmoil of my ideas at
one time made me fear that I was going mad. I then felt for the first
time the frailty of the instrument of thought in regard to the faculty
which rules and governs it.

In brief, I was--thanks to my double discovery--in possession of a law
whose deductions ought to touch the loftiest questions of science and
art,--and I was enabled thenceforth to affirm upon strong and
irrefragable proof that the thumb, in its double sphere of action, is
the thermometer of life as well as of death.

Episode III.

The day after that which had been so fruitful both in emotions and
discoveries, a thousand recollections tumultuously besieged my mind and
still disturbed me. I saw that if I could not contrive to classify them
in strict order of succession, I should never be able to derive any
practical value from them. I therefore took up link by link the chain of
events of the previous day, but in inverse order. That is, I began my
course where I left off the day before, and thus proceeded toward the
Tuileries to end at the Medical School.

At the retrospective sight of all that merry, noisy little world, of all
those fat, cheerful nurses, careless and laughing as they were, of those
m