CE IN FONTAINEBLEAU.

It did not take long to get spread about the town that M. Martout and
the Messieurs Renault, intended, in conjunction with several Paris
_savans_, to resuscitate a dead man.

M. Martout had sent a detailed account of the case to the celebrated
Karl Nibor, who had hastened to lay it before the Biological Society. A
committee was forthwith appointed to accompany M. Nibor to
Fontainebleau. The six commissioners and the reporter agreed to leave
Paris the 15th of August,[2] being glad to escape the din of the public
rejoicings. M. Martout was notified to get things ready for the
experiment, which would probably last not less than three days.

Some of the Paris papers announced this great event among their
"Miscellaneous Items," but the public paid little attention to it. The
grand reception of the army returning from Italy engrossed everybody's
interest, and moreover, the French do not put more than moderate faith
in miracles promised in the newspapers.

But at Fontainebleau, it was an entirely different matter. Not only
Monsieur Martout and the Messieurs Renault, but M. Audret, the
architect, M. Bonnivet, the notary, and a dozen other of the bigwigs of
the town, had seen and touched the mummy of the Colonel. They had spoken
about it to their friends, had described it to the best of their
ability, and had recounted its history. Two or three copies of Herr
Meiser's will were circulating from hand to hand. The question of
reanimations was the order of the day; they discussed it around the
fish-pond, like the Academy of Sciences at a full meeting. Even in the
market-place you could have heard them talking about rotifers and
tardigrades.

It must be admitted that the resuscitationists were not in the majority.
A few professors of the college, noted for the paradoxical character of
their minds; a few lovers of the marvellous, who had been duly convicted
of table-tipping; and, to top off with a half dozen of those old
white-moustached grumblers who believe that the death of Napoleon I. is
a calumnious lie set afloat by the English, constituted the whole of the
army. M. Martout had against him not only the skeptics, but the
innumerable crowd of believers, in the bargain. One party turned him to
ridicule, the others proclaimed him revolutionary, dangerous, and an
enemy of the fundamental ideas on which society rests. The minister of
one little church preached, in inuendoes, against the Prometheuses who