At the doorway Josephine turned, and threw to her husband, who was
sitting near the chimney, one of those gay smiles with which a sensitive
woman whose soul comes at moments into her face, rendering it beautiful,
gives expression to irresistible hopes. Woman’s greatest charm lies
in her constant appeal to the generosity of man by the admission of a
weakness which stirs his pride and wakens him to the nobler sentiments.
Is not such an avowal of weakness full of magical seduction? When the
rings of the portiere had slipped with a muffled sound along the wooden
rod, she turned towards Claes, and made as though she would hide her
physical defects by resting her hand upon a chair and drawing herself
gracefully forward. It was calling him to help her. Balthazar, sunk for
a moment in contemplation of the olive-tinted head, which attracted
and satisfied the eye as it stood out in relief against the soft gray
background, rose to take his wife in his arms and carry her to her sofa.
This was what she wanted.
“You promised me,” she said, taking his hand which she held between her
own magnetic palms, “to tell me the secret of your researches. Admit,
dear friend, that I am worthy to know it, since I have had the courage
to study a science condemned by the Church that I might be able to
understand you. I am curious; hide nothing from me. Tell me first how
it happened, that you rose one morning anxious and oppressed, when over
night I had left you happy.”
“Is it to hear me talk of chemistry that you have made yourself so
coquettishly delightful?”
“Dear friend, a confidence which puts me in your inner heart is the
greatest of all pleasures for me; is it not a communion of souls which
gives birth to the highest happiness of earth? Your love comes back to
me not lessened, pure; I long to know what dream has had the power to
keep it from me so long. Yes, I am more jealous of a thought than of
all the women in the world. Love is vast, but it is not infinite, while
Science has depths unfathomed, to which I will not let you go alone.
I hate all that comes between us. If you win the glory for which
you strive, I must be unhappy; it will bring you joy, while I--I
alone--should be the giver of your happiness.”
“No, my angel, it was not an idea, not a thought; it was a man that
first led me into this glorious path.”
“A man!” she cried in terror.
“Do you remember, Pepita, the Polish officer who stayed with us in
1809?”
“Do I remember him!” she exclaimed; “I am often annoyed because my
memory still recalls those eyes, like tongues of fire darting from coals
of hell, those hollows above the eyebrows, that broad skull stripped
of hair, the upturned moustache, the angular, worn face!--What awful
impassiveness in his bearing! Ah! surely if there had been a room in any
inn I would never have allowed him to sleep here.”
“That Polish gentleman,” resumed Balthazar, “was named Adam de
Wierzchownia. When you left us alone that evening in the parlor, we
happened by chance to speak of chemistry. Compelled by poverty to give
up the study of that science, he had become a soldier. It was, I think,
by means of a glass of sugared water that we recognized each other as
adepts. When I ordered Mulquinier to bring the sugar in pieces, the
captain gave a start of surprise. ‘Have you studied chemistry?’ he
asked. ‘With Lavoisier,’ I answered. ‘You are happy in being rich and
free,’ he cried; then from the depths of his bosom came the sigh of a
man,--one of those sighs which reveal a hell of anguish hidden in the
brain or in the heart, a something ardent, concentrated, not to be
expressed in words. He ended his sentence with a look that startled
me. After a pause, he told me that Poland being at her last gasp he
had taken refuge in Sweden. There he had sought consolation for his
country’s fate in the study of chemistry, for which he had always felt
an irresistible vocation. ‘And I see you recognize as I do,’ he added,
‘that gum arabic, sugar, and starch, reduced to powder, each yield a
substance absolutely similar, with, when analyzed, the same qualitative
result.’
“He paused again; and then, after examining me with a searching eye, he
said confidentially, in a low voice, certain grave words whose general
meaning alone remains fixed on my memory; but he spoke with a force of
tone, with fervid inflections, with an energy of gesture, which stirred
my very vitals, and struck my imagination as the hammer strikes the
anvil. I will tell you briefly the arguments he used, which were to me
like the live coal laid by the Almighty upon Isaiah’s tongue; for my
studies with Lavoisier enabled me to understand their full bearing.
“‘Monsieur,’ he said, ‘the parity of these three substances, in
appearance so distinct, led me to think that all the productions of
nature ought to have a single principle. The researches of modern
chemistry prove the truth of this law in the larger part of natural
effects. Chemistry divides creation into two distinct parts,--organic
nature, and inorganic nature. Organic nature, comprising as it does all
animal and vegetable creations which show an organization more or less
perfect,--or, to be more exact, a greater or lesser motive power, which
gives more or less sensibility,--is, undoubtedly, the more important
part of our earth. Now, analysis has reduced all the products of
this nature to four simple substances, namely: three gases, nitrogen,
hydrogen, and oxygen, and another simple substance, non-metallic and
solid, carbon. Inorganic nature, on the contrary, so simple, devoid of
movement and sensation, denied the power of growth (too hastily
accorded to it by Linnaeus), possesses fifty-three simple substances, or
elements, whose different combinations make its products. Is it probable
that means should be more numerous where a lesser number of results are
produced?
“‘My master’s opinion was that these fifty-three primary bodies have
one originating principle, acted upon in the past by some force the
knowledge of which has perished to-day, but which human genius ought to
rediscover. Well, then, suppose that this force does live and act again;
we have chemical unity. Organic and inorganic nature would apparently
then rest on four essential principles,--in fact, if we could decompose
nitrogen which we ought to consider a negation, we should have but
three. This brings us at once close upon the great Ternary of the
ancients and of the alchemists of the Middle Ages, whom we do wrong to
scorn. Modern chemistry is nothing more than that. It is much, and yet
little,--much, because the science has never recoiled before difficulty;
little, in comparison with what remains to be done. Chance has served
her well, my noble Science! Is not that tear of crystallized pure
carbon, the diamond, seemingly the last substance possible to create?
The old alchemists, who thought that gold was decomposable and therefore
creatable, shrank from the idea of producing the diamond. Yet we have
discovered the nature and the law of its composition.
“‘As for me,’ he continued, ‘I have gone farther still. An experiment
proved to me that the mysterious Ternary, which has occupied the human
mind from time immemorial, will not be found by physical analyses, which
lack direction to a fixed point. I will relate, in the first place, the
experiment itself.
“‘Sow cress-seed (to take one among the many substances of organic
nature) in flour of brimstone (to take another simple substance).
Sprinkle the seed with distilled water, that no unknown element may
reach the product of the germination. The seed germinates, and sprouts
from a known environment, and feeds only on elements known by analysis.
Cut off the stalks from time to time, till you get a sufficient quantity
to produce after burning them enough ashes for the experiment. Well,
by analyzing those ashes, you will obtain silicic acid, aluminium,
phosphate and carbonate of lime, carbonate of magnesia, the sulphate and
carbonate of potassium, and oxide of iron, precisely as if the cress
had grown in ordinary earth, beside a brook. Now, those elements did not
exist in the brimstone, a simple substance which served for soil to the
cress, nor in the distilled water with which the plant was nourished,
whose composition was known. But since they are no more to be found
in the seed itself, we can explain their presence in the plant only by
assuming the existence of a primary element common to all the substances
contained in the cress, and also to all those by which we environed
it. Thus the air, the distilled water, the brimstone, and the various
elements which analysis finds in the cress, namely, potash, lime,
magnesia, aluminium, etc., should have one common principle floating in
the atmosphere like light of the sun.
“‘From this unimpeachable experiment,’ he cried, ‘I deduce the existence
of the Alkahest, the Absolute,--a substance common to all created
things, differentiated by one primary force. Such is the net meaning
and position of the problem of the Absolute, which appears to me to
be solvable. In it we find the mysterious Ternary, before whose shrine
humanity has knelt from the dawn of ages,--the primary matter, the
medium, the product. We find that terrible number THREE in all things
human. It governs religions, sciences, and laws.
“‘It was at this point,’ he went on, ‘that poverty put an end to my
researches. You were the pupil of Lavoisier, you are rich, and master of
your own time, I will therefore tell you my conjectures. Listen to the
conclusions my personal experiments have led me to foresee. The PRIME
MATTER must be the common principle in the three gases and in carbon.
The MEDIUM must be the principle common to negative and positive
electricity. Proceed to the discovery of the proofs that will establish
those two truths; you will then find the explanation of all phenomenal
existence.
“‘Oh, monsieur!’ he cried, striking his brow, ‘when I know that I
carry here the last word of Creation, when intuitively I perceive the
Unconditioned, is it LIVING to be dragged hither and thither in the ruck
of men who fly at each other’s throats at the word of command without
knowing what they are doing? My actual life is an inverted dream. My
body comes and goes and acts; it moves amid bullets, and cannon, and
men; it crosses Europe at the will of a power I obey and yet despise. My
soul has no consciousness of these acts; it is fixed, immovable, plunged
in one idea, rapt in that idea, the Search for the Alkahest,--for that
principle by which seeds that are absolutely alike, growing in the same
environments, produce, some a white, others a yellow flower. The same
phenomenon is seen in silkworms fed from the same leaves, and apparently
constituted exactly alike,--one produces yellow silk, another white; and
if we come to man himself, we find that children often resemble neither
father nor mother. The logical deduction from this fact surely involves
the explanation of all the phenomena of nature.
“‘Ah, what can be more in harmony with our ideas of God than to believe
that he created all things by the simplest method? The Pythagorean
worship of ONE, from which come all other numbers, and which represented
Primal Matter; that of the number TWO, the first aggregation and the
type of all the rest; that of the number THREE, which throughout
all time has symbolized God,--that is to say, Matter, Force, and
Product,--are they not an echo, lingering along the ages, of some
confused knowledge of the Absolute? Stahl, Becker, Paracelsus, Agrippa,
all the great Searchers into occult causes took the Great Triad for
their watchword,--in other words, the Ternary. Ignorant men who despise
alchemy, that transcendent chemistry, are not aware that our work is
only carrying onward the passionate researches of those great men. Had
I found the Absolute, the Unconditioned, I meant to have grappled with
Motion. Ah! while I am swallowing gunpowder and leading men uselessly to
their death, my former master is piling discovery upon discovery! he
is soaring towards the Absolute, while I--I shall die like a dog in the
trenches!’
“When this poor grand man recovered his composure, he said, in a
touching tone of brotherhood, ‘If I see cause for a great experiment
I will bequeath it to you before I die.’--My Pepita,” cried Balthazar,
taking his wife’s hands, “tears of anguish rolled down his hollow
cheeks, as he cast into my soul the fiery arguments that Lavoisier had
timidly recognized without daring to follow them out--”
“Oh!” cried Madame Claes, unable to refrain from interrupting her
husband, “that man, passing one night under our roof, was able to
deprive us of your love, to destroy with a phrase, a word, the happiness
of a family! Oh, my dear Balthazar, did he make the sign of the cross?
did you examine him? The Tempter alone could have had that flaming eye
which sent forth the fire of Prometheus. Yes, none but the devil could
have torn you from me. From that day you have been neither husband, nor
father, nor master of your family.”
“What!” exclaimed Balthazar, springing to his feet and casting a
piercing glance at his wife, “do you blame your husband for rising above
the level of other men that he may lay at your feet the divine purple
of his glory, as a paltry offering in exchange for the treasures of your
heart! Ah, my Pepita,” he cried, “you do not know what I have done. In
these three years I have made giant strides--”
His face seemed to his wife at this moment more transfigured under the
fires of genius than she had ever seen it under the fires of love; and
she wept as she listened to him.
“I have combined chlorine and nitrogen; I have decomposed many
substances hitherto considered simple; I have discovered new metals.
Why!” he continued, noticing that his wife wept, “I have even decomposed
tears. Tears contain a little phosphate of lime, chloride of sodium,
mucin, and water.”
He went on speaking, without observing the spasm of pain that contracted
Josephine’s features; he was again astride of Science, which bore him
with outspread wings far away from material existence.
“This analysis, my dear,” he went on, “is one of the most convincing
proofs of the theory of the Absolute. All life involves combustion.
According to the greater or the lesser activity of the fire on its
hearth is life more or less enduring. In like manner, the destruction
of mineral bodies is indefinitely retarded, because in their case
combustion is nominal, latent, or imperceptible. In like manner, again,
vegetables, which are constantly revived by combinations producing
dampness, live indefinitely; in fact, we still possess certain
vegetables which existed before the period of the last cataclysm. But
each time that nature has perfected an organism and then, for some
unknown reason, has introduced into it sensation, instinct, or
intelligence (three marked stages of the organic system), these three
agencies necessitate a combustion whose activity is in direct proportion
to the result obtained. Man, who represents the highest point of
intelligence, and who offers us the only organism by which we arrive at
a power that is semi-creative--namely, THOUGHT--is, among all zoological
creations, the one in which combustion is found in its most intense
degree; whose powerful effects may in fact be seen to some extent in the
phosphates, sulphates, and carbonates which a man’s body reveals to
our analysis. May not these substances be traces left within him of
the passage of the electric fluid which is the principle of all
fertilization? Would not electricity manifest itself by a greater
variety of compounds in him than in any other animal? Should not he have
faculties above those of all other created beings for the purpose of
absorbing fuller portions of the Absolute principle? and may he not
assimilate that principle so as to produce, in some more perfect
mechanism, his force and his ideas? I think so. Man is a retort. In my
judgment, the brain of an idiot contains too little phosphorous or other
product of electro-magnetism, that of a madman too much; the brain of an
ordinary man has but little, while that of a man of genius is saturated
to its due degree. The man constantly in love, the street-porter, the
dancer, the large eater, are the ones who disperse the force resulting
from their electrical apparatus. Consequently, our feelings--”
“Enough, Balthazar! you terrify me; you commit sacrilege. What, is my
love--”
“An ethereal matter disengaged, an emanation, the key of the Absolute.
Conceive if I--I, the first, should find it, find it, find it!”
As he uttered the words in three rising tones, the expression of his
face rose by degrees to inspiration. “I shall make metals,” he cried; “I
shall make diamonds, I shall be a co-worker with Nature!”
“Will you be the happier?” she asked in despair. “Accursed science!
accursed demon! You forget, Claes, that you commit the sin of pride, the
sin of which Satan was guilty; you assume the attributes of God.”
“Oh! oh! God!”
“He denies Him!” she cried, wringing her hands. “Claes, God wields a
power that you can never gain.”
At this argument, which seemed to discredit his beloved Science, he
looked at his wife and trembled.
“What power?” he asked.
“Primal force--motion,” she replied. “This is what I learn from the
books your mania has constrained me to read. Analyze fruits, flowers,
Malaga wine; you will discover, undoubtedly, that their substances come,
like those of your water-cress, from a medium that seems foreign to
them. You can, if need be, find them in nature; but when you have them,
can you combine them? can you make the flowers, the fruits, the Malaga
wine? Will you have grasped the inscrutable effects of the sun, of the
atmosphere of Spain? Ah! decomposing is not creating.”
“If I discover the magistral force, I shall be able to create.”
“Will nothing stop him?” cried Pepita. “Oh! my love, my love! it is
killed! I have lost him!”
She wept bitterly, and her eyes, illumined by grief and by the sanctity
of the feelings that flooded her soul, shone with greater beauty than
ever through her tears.
“Yes,” she resumed in a broken voice, “you are dead to all. I see it
but too well. Science is more powerful within you than your own self;
it bears you to heights from which you will return no more to be the
companion of a poor woman. What joys can I still offer you? Ah! I would
fain believe, as a wretched consolation, that God has indeed created you
to make manifest his works, to chant his praises; that he has put within
your breast the irresistible power that has mastered you--But no; God is
good; he would keep in your heart some thoughts of the woman who adores
you, of the children you are bound to protect. It is the Evil One alone
who is helping you to walk amid these fathomless abysses, these clouds
of outer darkness, where the light of faith does not guide you,--nothing
guides you but a terrible belief in your own faculties! Were it
otherwise, would you not have seen that you have wasted nine hundred
thousand francs in three years? Oh! do me justice, you, my God on earth!
I reproach you not; were we alone I would bring you, on my knees, all
I possess and say, ‘Take it, fling it into your furnace, turn it into
smoke’; and I should laugh to see it float away in vapor. Were you poor,
I would beg without shame for the coal to light your furnace. Oh! could
my body yield your hateful Alkahest, I would fling myself upon those
fires with joy, since your glory, your delight is in that unfound
secret. But our children, Claes, our children! what will become of them
if you do not soon discover this hellish thing? Do you know why Pierquin
came to-day? He came for thirty thousand francs, which you owe and
cannot pay. I told him that you had the money, so that I might spare you
the mortification of his questions; but to get it I must sell our family
silver.”
She saw her husband’s eyes grow moist, and she flung herself
despairingly at his feet, raising up to him her supplicating hands.
“My friend,” she cried, “refrain awhile from these researches; let us
economize, let us save the money that may enable you to take them up
hereafter,--if, indeed, you cannot renounce this work. Oh! I do not
condemn it; I will heat your furnaces if you ask it; but I implore you,
do not reduce our children to beggary. Perhaps you cannot love them,
Science may have consumed your heart; but oh! do not bequeath them a
wretched life in place of the happiness you owe them. Motherhood has
sometimes been too weak a power in my heart; yes, I have sometimes
wished I were not a mother, that I might be closer to your soul, your
life! And now, to stifle my remorse, must I plead the cause of my
children before you, and not my own?”
Her hair fell loose and floated over her shoulders, her eyes shot forth
her feelings as though they had been arrows. She triumphed over her
rival. Balthazar lifted her, carried her to the sofa, and knelt at her
feet.
“Have I caused you such grief?” he said, in the tone of a man waking
from a painful dream.
“My poor Claes! yes, and you will cause me more, in spite of yourself,”
she said, passing her hand over his hair. “Sit here beside me,” she
continued, pointing to the sofa. “Ah! I can forget it all now, now that
you come back to us; all can be repaired--but you will not abandon
me again? say that you will not! My noble husband, grant me a woman’s
influence on your heart, that influence which is so needful to the
happiness of suffering artists, to the troubled minds of great men. You
may be harsh to me, angry with me if you will, but let me check you a
little for your good. I will never abuse the power if you will grant it.
Be famous, but be happy too. Do not love Chemistry better than you love
us. Hear me, we will be generous; we will let Science share your heart;
but oh! my Claes, be just; let us have our half. Tell me, is not my
disinterestedness sublime?”
She made him smile. With the marvellous art such women possess, she
carried the momentous question into the regions of pleasantry where
women reign. But though she seemed to laugh, her heart was violently
contracted and could not easily recover the quiet even action that was
habitual to it. And yet, as she saw in the eyes of Balthazar the rebirth
of a love which was once her glory, the full return of a power she
thought she had lost, she said to him with a smile:--
“Believe me, Balthazar, nature made us to feel; and though you may wish
us to be mere electrical machines, yet your gases and your ethereal
disengaged matters will never explain the gift we possess of looking
into futurity.”
“Yes,” he exclaimed, “by affinity. The power of vision which makes the
poet, the power of deduction which makes the man of science, are based
on invisible affinities, intangible, imponderable, which vulgar minds
class as moral phenomena, whereas they are physical effects. The prophet
sees and deduces. Unfortunately, such affinities are too rare and too
obscure to be subjected to analysis or observation.”
“Is this,” she said, giving him a kiss to drive away the Chemistry she
had so unfortunately reawakened, “what you call an affinity?”
“No; it is a compound; two substances that are equivalents are neutral,
they produce no reaction--”
“Oh! hush, hush,” she cried, “you will make me die of grief. I can never
bear to see my rival in the transports of your love.”
“But, my dear life, I think only of you. My work is for the glory of my
family. You are the basis of all my hopes.”
“Ah, look me in the eyes!”
The scene had made her as beautiful as a young woman; of her whole
person Balthazar saw only her head, rising from a cloud of lace and
muslin.
“Yes, I have done wrong to abandon you for Science,” he said. “If I fall
back into thought and preoccupation, then, my Pepita, you must drag me
from them; I desire it.”
She lowered her eyes and let him take her hand, her greatest beauty,--a
hand that was both strong and delicate.
“But I ask more,” she said.
“You are so lovely, so delightful, you can obtain all,” he answered.
“I wish to destroy that laboratory, and chain up Science,” she said,
with fire in her eyes.
“So be it--let Chemistry go to the devil!”
“This moment effaces all!” she cried. “Make me suffer now, if you will.”
Tears came to Balthazar’s eyes, as he heard these words.
“You were right, love,” he said. “I have seen you through a veil; I have
not understood you.”
“If it concerned only me,” she said, “willingly would I have suffered
in silence, never would I have raised my voice against my sovereign. But
your sons must be thought of, Claes. If you continue to dissipate your
property, no matter how glorious the object you have in view the world
will take little account of it, it will only blame you and yours. But
surely, it is enough for a man of your noble nature that his wife has
shown him a danger he did not perceive. We will talk of this no more,”
she cried, with a smile and a glance of coquetry. “To-night, my Claes,
let us not be less than happy.”