by Edmond About
CHAPTER VII.
PROFESSOR MEISER'S WILL IN FAVOR OF THE DESICCATED COLONEL.
On this 20th day of January, 1824, being worn down by a cruel malady andfeeling the approach of the time when my person shall be absorbed in theGreat All;
I have written with my own hand this testament which is the expressionof my last will.
I appoint as executor my nephew Nicholas Meiser, a wealthy brewer in thecity of Dantzic.
I bequeath my books, papers and scientific collections of all kinds,except item 3712, to my very estimable and learned friend, Herr VonHumboldt.
I bequeath all the rest of my effects, real and personal, valued at100,000 Prussian thalers or 375,000 francs, to Colonel Pierre VictorFougas, at present desiccated, but living, and entered in my catalogueopposite No. 3712 (Zoology).
I trust that he will accept this feeble compensation for the ordeals hehas undergone in my laboratory, and the service he has rendered toscience.
Finally, in order that my nephew Nicholas Meiser may exactly understandthe duties I leave him to perform, I have resolved to inscribe here adetailed account of the desiccation of Colonel Fougas, my sole heir.
It was on the 11th of November in that unhappy year 1813, that myrelations with this brave young man began. I had long since quittedDantzic, where the noise of cannon and the danger from bombs hadrendered all labor impossible, and retired with my instruments and booksunder the protection of the Allied Armies in the fortified town ofLiebenfeld. The French garrisons of Dantzic, Stettin, Custrin, Glogau,Hamburg and several other German towns could not communicate with eachother or with their native land; meanwhile General Rapp was obstinatelydefending himself against the English fleet and the Russian army.Colonel Fougas was taken by a detachment of the Barclay de Tolly corps,as he was trying to pass the Vistula on the ice, on the way to Dantzic.They brought him prisoner to Liebenfeld on the 11th of November, just atmy supper time, and Sergeant Garok, who commanded in the village, forcedme to be present at the examination and act as interpreter.
The open countenance, manly voice, proud firmness and fine carriage ofthe unfortunate young man won my heart. He had made the sacrifice of hislife. His only regret, he said, was having stranded so near port, afterpassing through four armies; and being unable to carry out the Emperor'sorders. He appeared animated by that French fanaticism which has doneso much harm to our beloved Germany. Nevertheless I could not helpdefending him; and I translated his words less as an interpreter than asan advocate. Unhappily, they found upon him a letter from Napoleon toGeneral Rapp, of which I preserved a copy:
"Abandon Dantzic, break the blockade, unite with the garrisons of Stettin, Custrin and Glogau, march along the Elbe, arrange with St. Cyr and Davoust to concentrate the forces scattered at Dresden, Forgau, Wittenberg, Magdeburg and Hamburg; roll up an army like a snow ball; cross Westphalia, which is open, and come to defend the line of the Rhine with an army of 170,000 Frenchmen which you will have saved!
"NAPOLEON."
This letter was sent to the headquarters of the Russian army, whilst ahalf-dozen illiterate soldiers, drunk with joy and bad brandy, condemnedthe brave Colonel of the 23d of the line to the death of a spy and atraitor. The execution was fixed for the next day, the 12th, and M.Pierre Victor Fougas, after having thanked and embraced me with the mosttouching sensibility, (He is a husband and a father.) was shut up in thelittle battlemented tower of Liebenfeld, where the wind whistlesterribly through all the loopholes.
The night of the 11th and 12th of November was one of the severest ofthat terrible winter. My self-registering thermometer, which hungoutside my window with a southeast exposure, marked nineteen degreesbelow zero, centigrade. I went early in the morning to bid the Colonel alast farewell, and met Sergeant Garok, who said to me in bad German:
"We won't have to kill the Frantzouski, he is frozen to death."
I ran to the prison. The colonel was lying on his back, rigid. But Ifound after a few minutes' examination, that the rigidity of the bodywas not that of death. The joints, though they had not their ordinarysuppleness, could be bent and extended without any great effort. Thelimbs, the face, and the chest gave my hands a sensation of cold, butvery different from that which I had often experienced from contact withcorpses.
Knowing that he had passed several nights without sleep, and enduredextraordinary fatigues, I did not doubt that he had fallen into thatprofound and lethargic sleep which is superinduced by intense cold, andwhich if too far prolonged slackens respiration and circulation to apoint where the most delicate physiological tests are necessary todiscover the continuance of life. The pulse was insensible; at least myfingers, benumbed with cold, could not feel it. My hardness of hearing(I was then in my sixty-ninth year) prevented my determining byauscultation whether the beats of the heart still aroused those feeblethough prolonged vibrations which the ear continues to hear some timeafter the hand fails to detect them.
The colonel had reached that point of torpor produced by cold, where torevive a man without causing him to die, requires numerous and delicateattentions. Some hours after, congelation would supervene, and with it,impossibility of restoration to life.
I was in the greatest perplexity. On the one hand I knew that he wasdying on my hands by congelation; on the other, I could not, by myself,bestow upon him the attentions that were indispensable. If I were toadminister stimulants without having him, at the same time, rubbed onthe trunk and limbs by three or four vigorous assistants, I would revivehim only to see him die. I had still before my eyes the spectacle ofthat lovely young girl asphyxiated in a fire, whom I succeeded inreviving by placing burning coals under the clavicles, but who couldonly call her mother, and died almost immediately, in spite of theadministration of internal stimulants and electricity for inducingcontractions of the diaphragm and heart.
And even if I should succeed in bringing him back to health andstrength, was not he condemned by court-martial? Did not humanity forbidmy rousing him from this repose akin to death, to deliver him to thehorrors of execution?
I must confess that in the presence of this organism where life wassuspended, my ideas on reanimation took, as it were, fresh hold upon me.I had so often desiccated and revived beings quite elevated in theanimal scale, that I did not doubt the success of the operation, even ona man. By myself alone I could not revive and save the Colonel; but Ihad in my laboratory, all the instruments necessary to desiccate himwithout assistance.
To sum up, three alternatives offered themselves to me. I. To leave theColonel in the crenellated tower, where he would have died the same dayof congelation. II. To revive him by stimulants, at the risk of killinghim. And for what? To give him up, in case of success, to inevitableexecution. III. To desiccate him in my laboratory with the quasicertainty of resuscitating him after the restoration of peace. Allfriends of humanity will doubtless comprehend that I could not hesitatelong.
I had Sergeant Garok called, and I begged him to sell me the body of theColonel. It was not the first time that I had bought a corpse fordissection, so my request excited no suspicion. The bargain concluded, Igave him four bottles of kirsch-wasser, and soon two Russian soldiersbrought me Colonel Fougas on a stretcher.
As soon as I was alone with him, I pricked one of his fingers: pressureforced out a drop of blood. To place it under a microscope between twoplates of glass was the work of a minute. Oh, joy! The fibrin was notcoagulated. The red globules appeared cleanly circular, flattened,biconcave, and without notches, indentations or spheroidal swellings.The white globules changed their shape, taking at intervals thespherical form, and varying their shapes again by delicate expansions. Iwas not deceived then, it was a torpid man that I had under my eyes, andnot a dead one!
I placed him on a pair of scales. He weighed one hundred and fortypounds, clothing included. I did not care to undress him, for I hadnoticed that animals desiccated directly in contact with the air, diedoftener than those which remained covered with moss and other softmateri
als, during the ordeal of desiccation.
My great air-pump, with its immense platform, its enormous ovalwrought-iron receiver, which a rope running on a pulley firmly fixed inthe ceiling easily raised and lowered by means of a windlass--all thesethousand and one contrivances which I had so laboriously prepared inspite of the railleries of those who envied me, and which I feltdesolate at seeing unemployed, were going to find their use! Unexpectedcircumstances had arisen at last to procure me such a subject forexperiment, as I had in vain endeavored to procure, while I wasattempting to reduce to torpidity dogs, rabbits, sheep and other mammalsby the aid of freezing mixtures. Long ago, without doubt, would theseresults have been attained if I had been aided by those who surroundedme, instead of being made the butt of their railleries; if ourauthorities had sustained me with their influence instead of treating meas a subversive spirit.
I shut myself up _tete-a-tete_ with the Colonel, and took care that evenold Getchen, my housekeeper, now deceased, should not trouble me duringmy work. I had substituted for the wearisome lever of the old fashionedair-pumps, a wheel arranged with an eccentric which transformed thecircular movement of the axis into the rectilinear movement required bythe pistons: the wheel, the eccentric, the connecting rod, and thejoints of the apparatus all worked admirably, and enabled me to doeverything by myself. The cold did not impede the play of the machine,and the lubricating oil was not gummed: I had refined it myself by a newprocess founded on the then recent discoveries of the French _savant_ M.Chevreul.
Having extended the body on the platform of the air-pump, lowered thereceiver and luted the rim, I undertook to submit it gradually to theinfluence of a dry vacuum and cold. Capsules filled with chloride ofcalcium were placed around the Colonel to absorb the water which shouldevaporate from the body, and to promote the desiccation.
I certainly found myself in the best possible situation for subjectingthe human body to a process of gradual desiccation without suddeninterruption of the functions, or disorganization of the tissues orfluids. Seldom had my experiments on rotifers and tardigrades beensurrounded with equal chances of success, yet they had always succeeded.But the particular nature of the subject and the special scruplesimposed upon my conscience, obliged me to employ a certain number of newconditions, which I had long since, in other connections, foreseen theexpediency of. I had taken the pains to arrange an opening at each endof my oval receiver, and fit into it a heavy glass, which enabled me tofollow with my eye the effects of the vacuum on the Colonel. I wasentirely prevented from shutting the windows of my laboratory, from fearthat a too elevated temperature might put an end to the lethargy of thesubject, or induce some change in the fluids. If a thaw had come on, allwould have been over with my experiment. But the thermometer kept forseveral days between six and eight degrees below zero, and I was veryhappy in seeing the lethargic sleep continue, without having to fearcongelation of the tissues.
I commenced to produce the vacuum with extreme slowness, for fear thatthe gases distributed through the blood, becoming free on account of thedifference of their tension from that of rarified air, might escape inthe vessels and so bring on immediate death. Moreover, I watched, everymoment, the effects of the vacuum on the intestinal gases, for byexpanding inside in proportion as the pressure of the air diminishedoutside of the body, they could have caused serious disorders. Thetissues might not have been entirely ruptured by them, but an internallesion would have been enough to occasion death in a few hours afterreanimation. One observes this quite frequently in animals carelesslydesiccated.
Several times, too rapid a protrusion of the abdomen put me on my guardagainst the danger which I feared, and I was obliged to let in a littleair under the receiver. At last, the cessation of all phenomena of thiskind satisfied me that the gases had disappeared by exosmose or had beenexpelled by the spontaneous contraction of the viscera. It was not untilthe end of the first day that I could give up these minute precautions,and carry the vacuum a little further.
The next day, the 13th, I pushed the vacuum to a point where thebarometer fell to five millimetres. As no change had taken place in theposition of the body or limbs, I was sure that no convulsion had beenproduced. The colonel had been desiccated, had become immobile, had lostthe power of performing the functions of life, without death havingsupervened, and without the possibility of returning to activity havingdeparted. His life was suspended, not extinguished.
Each time that a surplus of watery vapor caused the barometer to ascend,I pumped. On the 14th, the door of my laboratory was literally broken inby the Russian General, Count Trollohub, who had been sent fromheadquarters. This distinguished officer had run in all haste toprevent the execution of the colonel and to conduct him into thepresence of the Commander in Chief. I loyally confessed to him what Ihad done under the inspiration of my conscience; I showed him the bodythrough one of the bull's-eyes of the air-pump; I told him that I washappy to have preserved a man who could furnish useful information tothe liberators of my country; and I offered to resuscitate him at my ownexpense if they would promise me to respect his life and liberty. TheGeneral, Count Trollohub, unquestionably a distinguished man, but one ofan exclusively military education, thought that I was not speakingseriously. He went out slamming the door in my face, and treating melike an old fool.
I set myself to pumping again, and kept the vacuum at a pressure of fromthree to five millimetres for the space of three months. I knew byexperience that animals can revive after being submitted to a dry vacuumand cold for eighty days.
On the 12th of February 1814, having observed that for a month nomodification had taken place in the shrinking of the flesh, I resolvedto submit the Colonel to another series of operations, in order toinsure more perfect preservation by complete desiccation. I let the airre-enter by the stop-cock arranged for the purpose, and, after raisingthe receiver, proceeded at once to my experiment.
The body did not weigh more than forty-six pounds; I had then reduced itnearly to a third of its original weight. It should be borne in mindthat the clothing had not lost as much water as the other parts. Now thehuman body contains nearly four-fifths of its own weight of water, as isproved by a desiccation thoroughly made in a chemical drying furnace.
I accordingly placed the Colonel on a tray, and, after sliding it intomy great furnace, gradually raised the temperature to 75 degrees,centigrade. I did not dare to go beyond this heat, from fear of alteringthe albumen and rendering it insoluble, and also of taking away from thetissues the capacity of reabsorbing the water necessary to a return totheir functions.
I had taken care to arrange a convenient apparatus so that the furnacewas constantly traversed by a current of dry air. This air was dried intraversing a series of jars filled with sulphuric acid, quick-lime andchloride of calcium.
After a week passed in the furnace, the general appearance of the bodyhad not changed, but its weight was reduced to forty pounds, clothingincluded. Eight days more brought no new decrease of weight. From this,I concluded that the desiccation was sufficient. I knew very well thatcorpses mummified in church vaults for a century or more, end byweighing no more than a half-score of pounds, but they do not become solight without a material alteration in their tissues.
On the 27th of February, I myself placed the colonel in the boxes whichI had had made for his occupancy. Since that time, that is to say duringa space of nine years and eleven months, we have never been separated. Icarried him with me to Dantzic. He stays in my house. I have neverplaced him, according to his number, in my zoological collection; heremains by himself, in the chamber of honor. I do not grant any one thepleasure of re-using his chloride of calcium. I will take care of youtill my dying day, Oh Colonel Fougas, dear and unfortunate friend! But Ishall not have the joy of witnessing your resurrection. I shall notshare the delightful emotions of the warrior returning to life. Yourlachrymal glands, inert to-day, but some day to be reanimated, will notpour upon the bosom of your old benefactor, the sweet dew ofrecognition. For you will not recover y
our life until a day when minewill have long since departed! Perhaps you will be astonished that I,loving you as I do, should have so long delayed to draw you out of thisprofound slumber. Who knows but that some bitter reproach may come totaint the tenderness of the first offices of gratitude that you willperform over my tomb! Yes! I have prolonged, without any benefit to you,an experiment of general interest to others. I ought to have remainedfaithful to my first intention, and restored your life, immediatelyafter the signature of peace. But what! Was it well to send you back toFrance when the sun of your fatherland was obscured by our soldiers andallies? I have spared you that spectacle--one so grievous to such asoul as yours. Without doubt you would have had, in March, 1815, theconsolation of again seeing that fatal man to whom you had consecratedyour devotion; but are you entirely sure that you would not have beenswallowed up with his fortune, in the shipwreck of Waterloo?
For five or six years past, it has not been your welfare nor even thewelfare of science, that prevented me from reanimating you, it hasbeen.... Forgive me, Colonel, it has been a cowardly attachment to life.The disorder from which I am suffering, and which will soon carry meoff, is an aneurism of the heart; violent emotions are interdicted tome. If I were myself to undertake the grand operation whose process Ihave traced in a memorandum annexed to this instrument, I would, withoutany doubt, succumb before finishing it; my death would be an untowardaccident which might trouble my assistants and cause your resuscitationto fail.
Rest content! You will not have long to wait, and, moreover, what do youlose by waiting? You do not grow old, you are always twenty-four yearsof age; your children are growing up, you will be almost theircontemporary when you come to life again. You came to Liebenfeld poor,you are now in my house poor, and my will makes you rich. That you maybe happy also, is my dearest wish.
I direct that, the day after my death, my nephew, Nicholas Meiser,shall call together, by letter, the ten physicians most illustrious inthe kingdom of Prussia, that he shall read to them my will and theannexed memorandum, and that he shall cause them to proceed withoutdelay, in my own laboratory, to the resuscitation of Colonel Fougas. Theexpenses of travel, maintenance, etc., etc., shall be deducted from theassets of my estate. The sum of two thousand thalers shall be devoted tothe publication of the glorious results of the experiment, in German,French and Latin. A copy of this pamphlet shall be sent to each of thelearned societies then existing in Europe.
In the entirely unexpected event of the efforts of science being unableto reanimate the Colonel, all my effects shall revert to NicholasMeiser, my sole surviving relative.
JOHN MEISER, M. D.
