On that day, as it happened, the freak perspired very little; only a few rare droplets of red beaded upon his face. Terrified by the prospect of the long months of beggary that lay ahead, he pretended to move restlessly about in his fever and succeeded in making a series of deep cuts on his body and limbs, without arousing the suspicions of the observers gathered round him.
Thereupon, to everybody’s great delight, the sheets became drenched with blood. But the wounded dwarf could no longer control the bleeding; and when the marveling onlookers withdrew to proclaim to the people that never had the red sweat flowed before in anything approaching such profusion, they left him half-dead from loss of blood.
Particularly fine and numerous were the gifts that came for Pizzighini who, weak, anemic and only dragging himself around with difficulty, frightened everyone by the dreadful pallor of his complexion.
Now throughout that season a terrible and unremitting drought prevailed, and cruel famine raged everywhere. For the first time events ran contrary to the sweat’s prediction.
Then those who had witnessed the dwarf during his sweating crisis scented some trick and were suspicious after that of his supposedly feverish behavior. Compelling him to show his body, they discovered the scars left where he had deliberately gashed himself.
When the subterfuge was made public a huge outcry arose against the impostor who had aggravated the people’s present misery beforehand by extorting magnificent gifts. However, superstition preserved Pizzighini from any reprisal; no action was taken against him, for it was generally believed that, like some fetish, he could still cause much fine agricultural yield in the future. The people merely resolved to keep a closer watch henceforth on the appearance of the vermilion sweat.
So the dwarf, laughing up his sleeve, continued openly and impudently to squander the goods acquired by his cunning, while the whole land groaned. Nevertheless he remained extremely pale and exhausted, and his mien was spectral as he devoted himself to his customary incessant orgies.
Next year, when spring came round as usual, Pizzighini lay down on his bed, this time under close surveillance. But the crimson humectation was awaited in vain. The freak, who had remained anemic since his frightful hemorrhage, was no longer capable of producing the strange cutaneous phenomenon which until then had occurred, to a varying extent, so regularly.
He received no gifts.
Now at the end of four months a magnificent and most abundant harvest was garnered, proving the dwarf’s incapacity as a prophet.
After that, Pizzighini, killer of the golden goose, was destined to solitude and contempt, and lived in hopeless destitution. For his blood never recovered, and the annual diaphoresis never again made its appearance.
5. A passage in mythology according to which Atlas, exhausted with fatigue, one day let the celestial sphere fall from his shoulders and then, like a fractious child, aimed a terrible kick at the importunate burden that he was condemned to carry for all eternity. The disturbing intervention of his heel, which landed in the middle of Capricorn, explained the extraordinarily incoherent shape which the stars of this constellation have presented ever since.
6. An anecdote concerning Voltaire, taken from the correspondence of Frederick the Great.
In the autumn of 1775, Voltaire, then over eighty and at the height of his fame, was Frederick’s guest at Sans-Souci.
One day the two friends were walking in the neighborhood of the royal residence, and Frederick was allowing himself to be beguiled by his illustrious companion’s lively conversation, as the latter, filled with enthusiasm, expounded his uncompromisingly anti-religious doctrines with wit and ardor.
Forgetful of the time as they talked, at sunset the strolling couple found themselves deep in the country. Voltaire had just launched into a particularly virulent tirade against the old dogmas that he had fought so long.
Suddenly he fell silent in the middle of a sentence, rooted to the ground in the throes of some deep distress.
Not far from him a girl, hardly out of puberty, had just knelt down at the tolling of a distant bell sounding the angelus from the top of a little Catholic chapel. With hands joined and eyes turned heavenward, she fervently recited a Latin prayer aloud — and so swiftly did her ecstasy bear her away to the region of dreams and light that she was unaware of the presence of the two strangers.
Voltaire gazed at her with unspeakable anguish, which suffused the yellowed parchment of his face with a more than usually ashen hue. His features were contorted with a terrible emotion while, under the influence of the sacred language of the prayer he heard, the Latin word “Dubito” escaped his lips involuntarily, like a response.
This doubt clearly referred to his own atheistic theories. It was as though, on seeing the unearthly expression on the girl’s face as she prayed, he had received a revelation of the afterlife — as if, at the approach of death, which at his age was necessarily not far off, his whole being was possessed by the terror of eternal punishment.
This crisis only lasted a moment. Once more the great sceptic’s lips were pursed in irony and the sentence he had begun ended on a mordant note.
But he had been shaken, and Frederick was never to forget his brief and precious glimpse of Voltaire experiencing a mystical emotion.
7. An event which has a direct bearing on Richard Wagner’s genius.
On 17th October 1813, at Leipzig, the terrible struggle which had commenced the previous day, and which was to continue so relentlessly during the two days following, was interrupted by a truce between the French and the Allied forces.
On an outer boulevard was a crowd of mountebanks and itinerant pedlars such as always follow in the wake of armies. A number of townsmen were there mingling with the soldiers, and the whole scene had an air of liveliness which gave it rather the aspect of a fair.
A bevy of young women strolled gaily about in the throng, much entertained by the tinseled stalls and the showmen’s patter; one of them was carrying a son about five months old, who was none other than Richard Wagner, born at Leipzig on the 22nd of the preceding May.
Suddenly an old man with long hair, standing near a small table, called out to the young mother from afar, inviting her to have the child’s fortune told. The man, whose appearance and accent were as French as could be, expressed himself in such comic, laborious German that the cheerful strollers burst out laughing; he felt then that he had won his case, and it took only a little persuasion to bring their group over to him. With an air of mystery the old man examined the child, then took from the table a flat-bottomed cup in which a layer of bright iron filings lay evenly distributed.
Himself holding the object by its base, he requested the young mother to strike its edge three times with her finger, while thinking of her son’s destiny. She passively complied and gave the required three knocks with the tip of her forefinger, without letting go of her living bundle. The charlatan carefully set the cup down and put on an enormous pair of spectacles to examine the movements and perturbations caused by the triple blow in the hitherto perfectly smooth surface.
Suddenly he threw up his hands in amazement and, espying a writing case in front of him, took a blank sheet of paper and copied, in ink, the strange shape traced in the powdered metal. Then he handed the paper to the young woman who saw, in French the words “Will be pilfered” — legible enough, despite the jumbled outlines of the letters, which were of very unequal size and sloped in all directions. The charlatan at the same time pointed to the cup, drawing attention to the exact resemblance between the original and the copy — and indeed, as a consequence of the knocks, a very narrow, contorted furrow had been hollowed in the iron filings, forming the words transcribed.
The old man translated the short phrase into the Teutonic tongue for his client and made every effort in his bad German to explain its significance to her. According to him, this laconic expression contained the seeds of the mo
st exalted destiny among the arts and could only apply to some great innovator capable of giving rise to a pleiad of imitators as the founder of a school.
The happy mother, being rather superstitious, paid the fortune-teller generously and took away the piece of paper, which she kept as a precious document. Later she made a present of it to her son, telling him of the adventure in which he had once unconsciously figured as the hero.
Toward the end of Wagner’s life, when his works, known and understood at last, had already fallen prey to a host of unscrupulous plagiarists, he liked to tell the story — admitting that the prediction, by then so completely fulfilled, had had a beneficial effect on his whole career by giving him a superstitious encouragement during the long years of disappointments and fruitless struggles, when he was often in despair.
Once Canterel had fixed on these various subjects, he had the Cartesian divers constructed according to certain precise specifications. Each was to have a judiciously weighted base, in order to give it a constant equilibrium, and a small interior cavity treated with a special metal designed to attract and chemically isolate from its immediate vicinity the excess oxygen dispersed through the aqua-micans. Gradually, as the cavity filled with gas, the diver would become lighter and rise of its own accord from the bottom toward the surface. But when the oxygen reached a certain pressure, exactly ten seconds after the calculated beginning of the ascent, it would burst out of its tiny cavern — whose upper part, momentarily lifting like a lid, would enable the whole bubble to escape to the exterior. This was to set in motion a special mechanism causing some action in the diver related to the event that had inspired it. Once the air pocket was empty, the figure would descend under its own weight, and after a short while the oxygen, quickly formed again within it, would give rise to another flight.
Some of the automatic manifestations to be obtained required particularly delicate arrangements. For example, to make the luminous mark appear on Pilate’s forehead, a small electric lamp would have to be lit inside. The word “Dubito,” containing the whole essence of the story about Voltaire, was to be expelled from the great thinker’s parted lips in the shape of numerous air bubbles skillfully clustered into a calligraphic array, being simply the air bubble itself, very much divided. Each time the mechanism fitted to the dwarf Pizzighini operated, it would imitate a sweat of blood by expelling a minute amount of special red powder from a mass of outlets. Taken from a plentiful supply inside, this would color the water for a moment and disappear at once when it was completely dissolved. In the cup of the Leipzig charlatan imitation iron filings would furrow into the desired shape when the percussive finger tapped three times.
∗ ∗ ∗
Once these various points had been elucidated, it occurred to Canterel that he had not yet tasted his water. Accordingly, he manufactured a small special supply of it, to be swallowed with attention.
When poured out, the aqua-micans looked like liquid diamond and seemed made to gladden a parched throat; from his first draughts, the professor discovered that it was remarkably light, with a very delicate flavour. Thirstily, he swallowed three glassfuls of the sparkling potion, whose excessive oxygenation made him strangely inebriated.
Then Canterel determined to find out what sensations he would experience if he were to combine vinous intoxication with his present tipsiness. He had a very heady Sauternes brought in and began to fill the glass he had just been using from it, but a little of the water was left at the bottom, and the professor stopped short when he saw the first gush of white wine change instantly into a compact block. The strange water extended its amazing luster to this new submerged solid, which, in view of its color, flashed like the sun. The composition of the aqua-micans was such as to prevent any mixing of the two liquids, while sudden oxygenation caused the Bordeaux to harden. When Canterel handled the block with his fingers, he found it very malleable.
Forgetting his recently conceived experiment on double intoxication, he formed a project based on the manageable softness of the solid wine and its solar radiance.
He had lately devoted himself to numerous experiments in acclimation, and in particular had done his utmost to accustom certain sea fish to live in fresh water. His only procedure was to remove the salt very slowly and progressively from their native liquid — which required a great deal of patience and judgement to succeed — and if he noticed the slightest organic disturbance in his subjects, he suspended the process temporarily.
Canterel’s first success had been with a group of hippocampi, whose adaptation was already complete. Three out of ten had succumbed in the perilous process of habituation, but after that the seven unprotesting survivors permanently resided, without discomfort, in a jar of fresh water.
The professor proposed to immerse them in the great diamond in order to make them pull a sphere of solidified Sauternes which, due to its luster borrowed from the aqua-micans, would exactly resemble a miniature sun. The whole would thus evoke a kind of aquatic Apollo’s chariot.
To begin with, as a test, he plunged only the hippocampi into the faceted chamber to see whether any peculiarity of the novel water was harmful to their constitution.
Now after a moment the graceful creatures tried to escape from the aqua-micans in all directions and displayed signs of intense discomfort.
Suddenly, reproaching himself for not having foreseen the incident, Canterel understood the very simple cause of their distress: as the specular fluid was adapted to the breathing of purely terrestrial beings, its oxygen content was naturally too great for aquatic creatures, and the hippocampi were in just as much danger there as in free air. The professor hastily returned them to their jar with a dipping net.
Then, seeking a remedy for the great setback which threatened all his plans, he determined to pass a kind of seton through the breast of each; this would permit the excess oxygen formed in the sea horses’ bodies to escape, by keeping two apertures permanently open.
Tried first on a single hippocampus provided with a temporary seton, the experiment met with the most complete success; light bubbles began to force their way through the two new orifices as soon as the treated animals were plunged in the aqua-micans, where they moved peacefully about among the glittering reflections, feeling no discomfort. In ordinary water, when the edges of the double outlet were no longer being pushed outward by the superfluous air within, they adhered fully to the seton and became hermetically closed on each side.
Seeking for some method of harnessing the contemplated mythological emblem, Canterel decided to put each seton to a double use by making it long enough to be attached to the sphere of wine.
Since his idea was that the equipage should make a graceful circuit of the diamond’s interior, he proposed to add excitement to the show by instituting the first ever sea horse race. A certain amount of elasticity in the setons would allow the more agile competitors to move triumphantly ahead, though never more than a very little way, in view of the paltry means of locomotion which the hippocampi had at their disposal.
The professor ingeniously gave each of the seven long setons in question one of the seven prismatic shades so that punters might easily recognize their candidate, thus finding a substitute for the visual guide provided by jockeys’ colors on the turf. Having made a study of the seven coursers’ speeds beforehand, he staggered them at intervals from worst to best, giving their setons the colors of the rainbow from violet to red, in their correct order.
Considering how best to attach these eccentric traces to the yellow sphere, Canterel asked himself whether the electricity communicated by the aqua-micans to everything it enveloped might not suffice to create a degree of magnetic attraction between the solid wine and some conductor fixed to their ends. After several more or less affirmative trials, he gathered the two ends of each seton into a fine, shining sheath, made of a metal selected out of the complete range for the results it gave. When rather close to it in the aqua
-micans, it invariably attached itself to the miniature Phoebus.
Anxious to mark out the route clearly, Canterel submerged, not far from Danton’s head, a small, plain column shaft, which, in view of its carefully calculated density, was forced to remain motionless at a shallow depth, without the slightest tendency to move up or down. To make one lap the team were to circumnavigate on the one hand the immobile shaft and on the other the group of Cartesian divers functioning on the opposite side; while the center of the course would be always to the left. Because of their number and the inevitable lack of coordination as they rose and fell, there would always be at least one bottle-imp marking a point in the upper region where the race was to be run.
The professor considered that the sight of the Sauternes abruptly solidifying in contact with the aqua-micans was worthy of attention, so he decided to pour out the intrusive ration at the last moment — and train the hippocampi to shape the solar globe themselves, all kneading the crude block made available to them together with their left sides, which he leveled with a layer of wax the same color as themselves.
Once this education had succeeded as he wished, likewise the attachment of the blocks, which left no mark, he accustomed his pupils suddenly to leave their sphere and range themselves immediately in a single line, so that the setons’ metal sheaths might form a correct and even harness, sticking to the tiny luminary side by side and halting it in the middle of its slow descent.
Finally he taught them, at a signal, to go round the required course straining every nerve to overtake each other. The winning post was to be the column, which could be watched with one eye at a distance, through a narrow circle traced in black on one of the great diamond’s facets.
Canterel had trained the bearers of tinted setons, as they adjusted their curious harnesses, to line up aesthetically abreast, according to the proper order of the seven prismatic colors. Race horses must have names; so the professor, to avoid taxing anyone’s memory, gave the seven champions a simple numerical baptism in Latin, based on the variegated pattern of the rainbow from violet to red. Primus, holding the violet seton, was the least speedy of all and marked the left-hand end of the line, having thus the advantage of a constant lead — while the most lively, Septimus, wore the red seton on the far right and had, on the contrary, the longest of the seven tracks for himself. And the perfect correspondence between the total advantage attaching to each of the five intermediate positions and the abilities of those who held them succeeded in making this subtle handicap absolutely fair — based, as it was, on the unaccustomed obligation under which the competitors found themselves, of remaining constantly in the same place in the row, since they were harnessed to a single load.
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