Honoré de Balzac

“ Learned France was roused and a solemn discussion opened. Before pronouncing any decision the Faculty of Medicine in a body proscribed Mesmer’s socalled charlatanism, his tub, his divining rod and his theories. But, it must be said, this German unfortunately compromised his magnificent discovery by preposterous pecuniary claims. Mesmer failed through uncertainty about facts, through ignorance of the rôle played by hitherto unobserved imponderables in Nature, through his inaptitude for investigating the different sides of a triple-faced science. ”

“ Magnetism has more applications; in Mesmer’s hands it was, as regards its prospects, what principle is to effect. But, if the inventor was lacking in genius, it is sad for human reason and for France to have to state that a contemporary science of the societies, cultivated equally by Egypt and Chaldea, by Greece and India, experienced in Paris in the middle of the eighteenth century the fate that truth had met with in the person of Galileo in the sixteenth century, and that magnetism was scouted by the united attacks of religious people and materialistic philosophers, alike alarmed. ”

“ You do not believe in God, as if you could prevent Him from being! His word fills the world! In this you are the only cause of anxiety to this poor child—Ah! she is playing scales; she wishes she were an even better musician than she is, she frets about it. This is what she is thinking: ‘If I could sing well, if I had a beautiful voice, when he comes to his mother’s my voice would reach his ears.’”
Doctor Minoret took out his pocket-book and noted down the exact time. ”

“ His treatment of Bouvard was to cause him the only regret that troubled the serenity of his declining age. Since Doctor Minoret’s retirement to Nemours, the science of imponderables, the only name that tallies with magnetism, which is so closely allied by the nature of its phenomena to light and electricity, was making immense progress, in spite of the ceaseless jeers of Parisian science. ”

“ Despotic love has a horror of any kind of disagreement even in ideas that are alien to it Sometimes, the doctor yielded to his adopted daughter’s softly, tenderly spoken arguments as if they were caresses, breathed by the warmest and purest affection. Believers and unbelievers speak two different languages and can never agree. The godchild, in pleading God’s cause, would ill-treat her godfather just as a spoilt child sometimes ill-treats its mother. The curé gently reproved Ursule, and told her that God reserved the right to humble these haughty spirits. ”

“ Your ward examines her flowers, shows them to her nurse, makes holes with a dibble and puts in some seeds—The nurse is raking the paths—Although this young girl is as pure as an angel, there is a dawning of love within her, faint as the morning twilight. ”

“ The gown is always terrible. But are not ideas also much more implacable than things? Doctor Bouvard, one of Minoret’s friends, believed in the new faith, and persisted until his death in the science to which he had sacrificed his peace in life, for he was one of the bêtes-noires of the Faculty of Paris. Minoret, one of the stoutest upholders of the Encyclopedists, the most formidable enemy of Deslon, Mesmer’s provost, and whose pen carried enormous weight in this dispute, quarreled irrevocably with his fellow-physician ”

“ If you acknowledge that this woman has the faculty of reducing or of traversing space, if you admit the certainty that, from the Assumption, she hears and sees all that is being said and done at Nemours, then you must admit all the other magnetic effects, which to an unbeliever are as incredible as these are. So ask her for one proof only that shall satisfy you, for you may think that we procured all this information; but we could not know, for instance, what will take place at nine o’clock, in your house, in your ward’s room ”

“ Sight and hearing then exercise themselves more perfectly than in the condition called waking, and possibly without the aid of those organs which are the sheaths for those luminous swords called sight and hearing! ”

“ The miracles of the Convulsionaries, hushed up by the Church and the indifference of scholars, in spite of the valuable pamphlets of the Councillor Carré de Montgeron, were the first summons to make experiments with the human fluids which give the power to oppose interior forces sufficiently to annul the suffering caused by exterior agents. But it was necessary to recognize the existence of intangible, invisible and imponderable fluids, three negations which the science of that time insisted upon considering as a definition of space. In modern philosophy, space does not exist. ”

“ The guardian, proud of his godchild, then engaged an old German called Schmucke, a learned professor of music, to come from Paris once a week, and provided for the expenses of this art, which he had first thought perfectly useless in a household. Unbelievers do not like music, a celestial language developed by Catholicism, which has borrowed the names of the seven notes in one of its hymns; every note is the first syllable of the first seven verses of the hymn to St. John. Although vivid, the impression produced upon the old man by Ursule’s first communion was only temporary. ”

“ Ten feet of space and the world would crumble to pieces! According to materialists particularly, the world is full, everything is connected, everything is linked together and everything is contrived. “The world,” said Diderot, “as the result of chance, is more explicable than God. ”

“ Those wretched men, who deified anything rather than acknowledge God, also shrank before the infinite divisibility of matter that the nature of imponderable forces admits of. Locke and Condillac then delayed for fifty years the immense progress that the natural sciences now make under the idea of unity due to the great Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. ”

“ Several upright men, without any system, convinced by facts conscientiously considered, persisted in Mesmer’s doctrine, which recognized in man the existence of a penetrating influence, leading from man to man, worked by the will, healing by the abundance of fluid, the exercise of which constituted a duel between two wills, between an evil to be cured and the will to cure it. The phenomena of somnambulism, barely surmised by Mesmer, were due to Messieurs de Puységur and Deleuze ”

“ For a man put into this condition, distances and material objects do not exist, or are traversed by a life that is within us, and for which our body is a reservoir, a necessary prop, an envelope. Terms are wanting for such freshly recovered effects; for nowadays the words imponderable, intangible, invisible, have no meaning relative to the fluid whose action is demonstrated by magnetism. Light is weighable by its heat, which, by penetrating bodies, increases their volume, and electricity is certainly only too tangible. ”

“ To be charitable in your way, one must be a great philosopher; you raise yourself to your doctrine by reasoning, you are a social exception; whilst it suffices to be a Christian to be charitable according to ours. ”

“ The sound of backgammon is unbearable to people who do not know this game, one of the most difficult that exist. To avoid worrying his ward, whose delicacy of organs and nerves prevented her from listening with impunity to these movements and to this apparently senseless chatter, the curé, old Jordy, when he was alive, and the doctor, would always wait until their child had gone to bed or for a walk. It often happened that the game was still going on when Ursule came in ”

“ According to the confessions and manifestations of all somnambulists, this condition constitutes a delicious life during which the inmost being, freed from all the fetters which are brought into the exercise of its faculties by visible nature, wanders through the world which we wrongfully call invisible. ”

“ She is saying her evening prayers, she commends herself to God, beseeches Him to keep her mind from evil thoughts; she examines her conscience and goes over all she has done during the day, in order to know if she has failed in any of His commandments or those of the church. ”

“ Minoret took his pencil and wrote, at the somnambulist’s dictation, the following prayer, evidently composed by the Abbé Chaperon:
“‘O God! if Thou art pleased with Thy servant, who adores Thee, and prays to Thee with as much love as fervor, who tries in every way to keep Thy Holy Commandments, who would gladly die as did Thy Son to glorify Thy name, and who would dwell within Thy shadow, Thou who readest all hearts, graciously deign to open my godfather’s eyes, set him in the way of salvation, and impart to him Thy grace so that he may live his last days in Thee ”