lodgings to the Church of
Saint-Germain des Pres, where the service was to be held. Monsieur de
Chargeboeuf, Monsieur de Granville's private secretary, had orders to
this effect. The body was to be transferred from the prison during the
night. The secretary was desired to go at once and settle matters at the
Mairie with the parish authorities and with the official undertakers.
Thus, to the world in general, Lucien would have died at liberty in his
own lodgings, the funeral would start from thence, and his friends would
be invited there for the ceremony.

So, when Camusot, his mind at ease, was sitting down to dinner with his
ambitious better-half, the Governor of the Conciergerie and Monsieur
Lebrun, the prison doctor, were standing outside the gate bewailing the
fragility of iron bars and the strength of ladies in love.

"No one knows," said the doctor to Monsieur Gault, "what an amount
of nervous force there is in a man wound up to the highest pitch of
passion. Dynamics and mathematics have no formulas or symbols to express
that power. Why, only yesterday, I witnessed an experiment which gave me
a shudder, and which accounts for the terrible strength put forth just
now by that little woman."

"Tell me about it," said Monsieur Gault, "for I am so foolish as to take
an interest in magnetism; I do not believe in it, but it mystifies me."

"A physician who magnetizes--for there are men among us who believe in
magnetism," Lebrun went on, "offered to experiment on me in proof of a
phenomenon that he described and I doubted. Curious to see with my own
eyes one of the strange states of nervous tension by which the existence
of magnetism is demonstrated, I consented.

"These are the facts.--I should very much like to know what our College
of Medicine would say if each of its members in turn were subjected to
this influence, which leaves no loophole for incredulity.

"My old friend--this doctor," said Doctor Lebrun parenthetically, "is
an old man persecuted for his opinions since Mesmer's time by all the
faculty; he is seventy or seventy-two years of age, and his name is
Bouvard. At the present day he is the patriarchal representative of the
theory of animal magnetism. This good man regards me as a son; I owe my
training to him.--Well, this worthy old Bouvard it was who proposed to
prove to me that nerve-force put in motion by the magnetizer was, not
indeed infinite, for man is under immutable laws, but a power acting
lik