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Bouvard and Pécuchet, part 1
Bouvard said to him:
"There is always a way to make up for lost time. Come – no sadness! I will take it on myself, if you like."
Pécuchet answered, with a sigh, that he need not think any more about it; and they went on with their physiology.
Is it true that the surfaces of our bodies are always letting out a subtle vapour? The proof of it is that the weight of a man is decreasing every minute. If each day what is wanting is added and what is excessive subtracted, the health would be kept in perfect equilibrium. Sanctorius, the discoverer of this law, spent half a century weighing his food every day together with its excretions, and took the weights himself, giving himself no rest, save for the purpose of writing down his computations.
They tried to imitate Sanctorius; but, as their scales could not bear the weight of both of them, it was Pécuchet who began.
He took his clothes off, in order not to impede the perspiration, and he stood on the platform of the scales perfectly naked, exposing to view, in spite of his modesty, his unusually long torso, resembling a cylinder, together with his short legs and his brown skin. Beside him, on his chair, his friend read for him:
"'Learned men maintain that animal heat is developed by the contractions of the muscles, and that it is possible by moving the thorax and the pelvic regions to raise the temperature of a warm bath.'"
Bouvard went to look for their bathing-tub, and, when everything was ready, plunged into it, provided with a thermometer. The wreckage of the distillery, swept towards the end of the room, presented in the shadow the indistinct outlines of a hillock. Every now and then they could hear the mice nibbling; there was a stale odour of aromatic plants, and finding it rather agreeable, they chatted serenely.
However, Bouvard felt a little cool.
"Move your members about!" said Pécuchet.
He moved them, without at all changing with the thermometer. "'Tis decidedly cold."
"I am not hot either," returned Pécuchet, himself seized with a fit of shivering. "But move about your pelvic regions – move them about!"
Bouvard spread open his thighs, wriggled his sides, balanced his stomach, puffed like a whale, then looked at the thermometer, which was always falling.
"I don't understand this at all! Anyhow, I am stirring myself!"
"Not enough!"
And he continued his gymnastics.
This had gone on for three hours when once more he grasped the tube.
"What! twelve degrees! Oh, good-night! I'm off to bed!"
A dog came in, half mastiff, half hound, mangy, with yellowish hair and lolling tongue.
What were they to do? There was no bell, and their housekeeper was deaf. They were quaking, but did not venture to budge, for fear of being bitten.
Pécuchet thought it a good idea to hurl threats at him, and at the same time to roll his eyes about.
Then the dog began to bark; and he jumped about the scales, in which Pécuchet, by clinging on to the cords and bending his knees, tried to raise himself up as high as ever he could.
"You're getting your death of cold up there!" said Bouvard; and he began making smiling faces at the dog, while pretending to give him things.
The dog, no doubt, understood these advances. Bouvard went so far as to caress him, stuck the animal's paws on his shoulders, and rubbed them with his finger-nails.
"Hollo! look here! there, he's off with my breeches!"
The dog cuddled himself upon them, and lay quiet.
At last, with the utmost precautions, they ventured the one to come down from the platform of the scales, and the other to get out of the bathing-tub; and when Pécuchet had got his clothes on again, he gave vent to this exclamation:
"You, my good fellow, will be of use for our experiments."
What experiments? They might inject phosphorus into him, and then shut him up in a cellar, in order to see whether he would emit fire through the nostrils.
But how were they to inject it? and furthermore, they could not get anyone to sell them phosphorus.
They thought of putting him under a pneumatic bell, of making him inhale gas, and of giving him poison to drink. All this, perhaps, would not be funny! Eventually, they thought the best thing they could do was to apply a steel magnet to his spinal marrow.
Bouvard, repressing his emotion, handed some needles on a plate to Pécuchet, who fixed them against the vertebræ. They broke, slipped, and fell on the ground. He took others, and quickly applied them at random. The dog burst his bonds, passed like a cannon-ball through the window, ran across the yard to the vestibule, and presented himself in the kitchen.
Germaine screamed when she saw him soaked with blood, and with twine round his paws.
Her masters, who had followed him, came in at the same moment. He made one spring and disappeared.
The old servant turned on them.
"This is another of your tomfooleries, I'm sure! And my kitchen, too! It's nice! This perhaps will drive him mad! People are in jail who are not as bad as you!"
They got back to the laboratory in order to examine the magnetic needles.
Not one of them had the least particle of the filings drawn off.
Then Germaine's assumption made them uneasy. He might get rabies, come back unawares, and make a dash at them.
Next day they went making inquiries everywhere, and for many years they turned up a by-path whenever they saw in the open country a dog at all resembling this one.
Their other experiments were unsuccessful. Contrary to the statements in the text-books, the pigeons which they bled, whether their stomachs were full or empty, died in the same space of time. Kittens sunk under water perished at the end of five minutes; and a goose, which they had stuffed with madder, presented periostea that were perfectly white.
The question of nutrition puzzled them.
How did it happen that the same juice is produced by bones, blood, lymph, and excrementitious materials? But one cannot follow the metamorphoses of an article of food. The man who uses only one of them is chemically equal to him who absorbs several. Vauquelin, having made a calculation of all the lime contained in the oats given as food to a hen, found a greater quantity of it in the shells of her eggs. So, then, a creation of substance takes place. In what way? Nothing is known about it.
It is not even known what is the strength of the heart. Borelli says it is what is necessary for lifting a weight of one hundred and eighty thousand pounds, while Kiell estimates it at about eight ounces; and from this they drew the conclusion that physiology is – as a well-worn phrase expresses it – the romance of medicine. As they were unable to understand it, they did not believe in it.
A month slipped away in doing nothing. Then they thought of their garden. The dead tree, displayed in the middle of it, was annoying, and accordingly, they squared it. This exercise fatigued them. Bouvard very often found it necessary to get the blacksmith to put his tools in order.
One day, as he was making his way to the forge, he was accosted by a man carrying a canvas bag on his back, who offered to sell him almanacs, pious books, holy medals, and lastly, the Health Manual of François Raspail.5
This little book pleased him so much that he wrote to Barberou to send him the large work. Barberou sent it on, and in his letter mentioned an apothecary's shop for the prescriptions given in the work.
The simplicity of the doctrine charmed them. All diseases proceed from worms. They spoil the teeth, make the lungs hollow, enlarge the liver, ravage the intestines, and cause noises therein. The best thing for getting rid of them is camphor. Bouvard and Pécuchet adopted it. They took it in snuff, they chewed it and distributed it in cigarettes, in bottles of sedative water and pills of aloes. They even undertook the care of a hunchback. It was a child whom they had come across one fair-day. His mother, a beggar woman, brought him to them every morning. They rubbed his hump with camphorated grease, placed there for twenty minutes a mustard poultice, then covered it over with diachylum, and, in order to make sure of his coming back, gave him his breakfast.
As his mind was fixed on intestinal worms, Pécuchet noticed a singular spot on Madame Bordin's cheek. The doctor had for a long time been treating it with bitters. Round at first as a twenty-sou piece, this spot had enlarged and formed a red circle. They offered to cure it for her. She consented, but made it a condition that the ointment should be applied by Bouvard. She took a seat before the window, unfastened the upper portion of her corset, and remained with her cheek turned up, looking at him with a glance of her eye which would have been dangerous were it not for Pécuchet's presence. In the prescribed doses, and in spite of the horror felt with regard to mercury, they administered calomel. One month afterwards Madame Bordin was cured. She became a propagandist in their behalf, and the tax-collector, the mayor's secretary, the mayor himself, and everybody in Chavignolles sucked camphor by the aid of quills.
However, the hunchback did not get straight; the collector gave up his cigarette; it stopped up his chest twice as much. Foureau made complaints that the pills of aloes gave him hemorrhoids. Bouvard got a stomachache, and Pécuchet fearful headaches. They lost confidence in Raspail, but took care to say nothing about it, fearing that they might lessen their own importance.
They now exhibited great zeal about vaccine, learned how to bleed people over cabbage leaves, and even purchased a pair of lancets.
They accompanied the doctor to the houses of the poor, and then consulted their books. The symptoms noticed by the writers were not those which they had just observed. As for the names of diseases, they were Latin, Greek, French – a medley of every language. They are to be counted by thousands; and Linnæus's system of classification, with its genera and its species, is exceedingly convenient; but how was the species to be fixed? Then they got lost in the philosophy of medicine. They raved about the life-principle of Van Helmont, vitalism, Brownism, organicism, inquired of the doctor whence comes the germ of scrofula, towards what point the infectious miasma inclines, and the means in all cases of disease to distinguish the cause from its effects.
"The cause and the effect are entangled in one another," replied Vaucorbeil.
His want of logic disgusted them – and they went by themselves to visit the sick, making their way into the houses on the pretext of philanthropy. At the further end of rooms, on dirty mattresses, lay persons with faces hanging on one side, others who had them swollen or scarlet, or lemon-coloured, or very violet-hued, with pinched nostrils, trembling mouths, rattlings in the throat, hiccoughs, perspirations, and emissions like leather or stale cheese.
They read the prescriptions of their physicians, and were surprised at the fact that anodynes are sometimes excitants, and emetics purgatives, that the same remedy suits different ailments, and that a malady may disappear under opposite systems of treatment.
Nevertheless, they gave advice, got on the moral hobby again, and had the assurance to auscultate. Their imagination began to ferment. They wrote to the king, in order that there might be established in Calvados an institute of nurses for the sick, of which they would be the professors.
They would go to the apothecary at Bayeux (the one at Falaise had always a grudge against them on account of the jujube affair), and they gave him directions to manufacture, like the ancients, pila purgatoria, that is to say, medicaments in the shape of pellets, which, by dint of handling, become absorbed in the individual.
In accordance with the theory that by diminishing the heat we impede the watery humours, they suspended in her armchair to the beams of the ceiling a woman suffering from meningitis, and they were swinging her with all their force when the husband, coming on the scene, kicked them out. Finally, they scandalised the curé thoroughly by introducing the new fashion of thermometers in the rectum.
Typhoid fever broke out in the neighbourhood. Bouvard declared that he would not have anything to do with it. But the wife of Gouy, their farmer, came groaning to them. Her man was a fortnight sick, and M. Vaucorbeil was neglecting him. Pécuchet devoted himself to the case.
Lenticular spots on the chest, pains in the joints, stomach distended, tongue red, these were all symptoms of dothienenteritis. Recalling the statement of Raspail that by taking away the regulation of diet the fever may be suppressed, he ordered broth and a little meat.
The doctor suddenly made his appearance. His patient was on the point of eating, with two pillows behind his back, between his wife and Pécuchet, who were sustaining him. He drew near the bed, and flung the plate out through the window, exclaiming:
"This is a veritable murder!"
"Why?"
"You perforate the intestine, since typhoid fever is an alteration of its follicular membrane."
"Not always!"
And a dispute ensued as to the nature of fevers. Pécuchet believed that they were essential in themselves; Vaucorbeil made them dependent on our bodily organs.
"Therefore, I remove everything that might excite them excessively."
"But regimen weakens the vital principle."
"What twaddle are you talking with your vital principle? What is it? Who has seen it?"
Pécuchet got confused.
"Besides," said the physician, "Gouy does not want food."
The patient made a gesture of assent under his cotton nightcap.
"No matter, he requires it!"
"Not a bit! his pulse is at ninety-eight!"
"What matters about his pulse?" And Pécuchet proceeded to give authorities.
"Let systems alone!" said the doctor.
Pécuchet folded his arms. "So then, you are an empiric?"
"By no means; but by observing – "
"But if one observes badly?"
Vaucorbeil took this phrase for an allusion to Madame Bordin's skin eruption – a story about which the widow had made a great outcry, and the recollection of which irritated him.
"To start with, it is necessary to have practised."
"Those who revolutionised the science did not practise – Van Helmont, Boerhaave, Broussais himself."
Without replying, Vaucorbeil stooped towards Gouy, and raising his voice:
"Which of us two do you select as your doctor?"
The patient, who was falling asleep, perceived angry faces, and began to blubber. His wife did not know either what answer to make, for the one was clever, but the other had perhaps a secret.
"Very well," said Vaucorbeil, "since you hesitate between a man furnished with a diploma – "
Pécuchet sneered.
"Why do you laugh?"
"Because a diploma is not always an argument."
The doctor saw himself attacked in his means of livelihood, in his prerogative, in his social importance. His wrath gave itself full vent.
"We shall see that when you are brought up before the courts for illegally practising medicine!" Then, turning round to the farmer's wife, "Get him killed by this gentleman at your ease, and I'm hanged if ever I come back to your house!"
And he dashed past the beech trees, shaking his walking-stick as he went.
When Pécuchet returned, Bouvard was himself in a very excited state. He had just had a visit from Foureau, who was exasperated about his hemorrhoids. Vainly had he contended that they were a safeguard against every disease. Foureau, who would listen to nothing, had threatened him with an action for damages. He lost his head over it.
Pécuchet told him the other story, which he considered more serious, and was a little shocked at Bouvard's indifference.
Gouy, next day, had a pain in his abdomen. This might be due to the ingestion of the food. Perhaps Vaucorbeil was not mistaken. A physician, after all, ought to have some knowledge of this! And a feeling of remorse took possession of Pécuchet! He was afraid lest he might turn out a homicide.
For prudence' sake they sent the hunchback away. But his mother cried a great deal at his losing the breakfast, not to speak of the infliction of having made them come every day from Barneval to Chavignolles.
Foureau calmed down, and Gouy recovered his strength. At the present moment the cure was certain. A success like this emboldened Pécuchet.
"If we studied obstetrics with the aid of one of these manikins – "
"Enough of manikins!"
"There are half-bodies made with skin invented for the use of students of midwifery. It seems to me that I could turn over the fœtus!"
But Bouvard was tired of medicine.
"The springs of life are hidden from us, the ailments too numerous, the remedies problematical. No reasonable definitions are to be found in the authors of health, disease, diathesis, or even pus."
However, all this reading had disturbed their brains.
Bouvard, whenever he caught a cold, imagined he was getting inflammation of the lungs. When leeches did not abate a stitch in the side, he had recourse to a blister, whose action affected the kidneys. Then he fancied he had an attack of stone.
Pécuchet caught lumbago while lopping the elm trees, and vomited after his dinner – a circumstance which frightened him very much. Then, noticing that his colour was rather yellow, suspected a liver complaint, and asked himself, "Have I pains?" and ended by having them.
Mutually becoming afflicted, they looked at their tongues, felt each other's pulses, made a change as to the use of mineral waters, purged themselves – and dreaded cold, heat, wind, rain, flies, and principally currents of air.
Pécuchet imagined that taking snuff was fatal. Besides, sneezing sometimes causes the rupture of an aneurism; and so he gave up the snuff-box altogether. From force of habit he would thrust his fingers into it, then suddenly become conscious of his imprudence.
As black coffee shakes the nerves, Bouvard wished to give up his half cup; but he used to fall asleep after his meals, and was afraid when he woke up, for prolonged sleep is a foreboding of apoplexy.
Their ideal was Cornaro, that Venetian gentleman who by the regulation of his diet attained to an extreme old age. Without actually imitating him, they might take the same precautions; and Pécuchet took down from his bookshelves a Manual of Hygiene by Doctor Morin.
"How had they managed to live till now?"
Their favourite dishes were there prohibited. Germaine, in a state of perplexity, did not know any longer what to serve up to them.
Every kind of meat had its inconveniences. Puddings and sausages, red herrings, lobsters, and game are "refractory." The bigger a fish is, the more gelatine it contains, and consequently the heavier it is. Vegetables cause acidity, macaroni makes people dream; cheeses, "considered generally, are difficult of digestion." A glass of water in the morning is "dangerous." Everything you eat or drink being accompanied by a similar warning, or rather by these words: "Bad!" "Beware of the abuse of it!" "Does not suit everyone!" Why bad? Wherein is the abuse of it? How are you to know whether a thing like this suits you?
What a problem was that of breakfast! They gave up coffee and milk on account of its detestable reputation, and, after that, chocolate, for it is "a mass of indigestible substances." There remained, then, tea. But "nervous persons ought to forbid themselves the use of it completely." Yet Decker, in the seventeenth century, prescribed twenty decalitres6 of it a day, in order to cleanse the spongy parts of the pancreas.
This direction shook Morin in their estimation, the more so as he condemns every kind of head-dress, hats, women's caps, and men's caps – a requirement which was revolting to Pécuchet.
Then they purchased Becquerel's treatise, in which they saw that pork is in itself "a good aliment," tobacco "perfectly harmless in its character," and coffee "indispensable to military men."
Up to that time they had believed in the unhealthiness of damp places. Not at all! Casper declares them less deadly than others. One does not bathe in the sea without refreshing one's skin. Bégin advises people to cast themselves into it while they are perspiring freely. Wine taken neat after soup is considered excellent for the stomach; Levy lays the blame on it of impairing the teeth. Lastly, the flannel waistcoat – that safeguard, that preserver of health, that palladium cherished by Bouvard and inherent to Pécuchet, without any evasions or fear of the opinions of others – is considered unsuitable by some authors for men of a plethoric and sanguine temperament!
What, then, is hygiene? "Truth on this side of the Pyrenees, error on the other side," M. Levy asserts; and Becquerel adds that it is not a science.
So then they ordered for their dinner oysters, a duck, pork and cabbage, cream, a Pont l'Evêque cheese, and a bottle of Burgundy. It was an enfranchisement, almost a revenge; and they laughed at Cornaro! It was only an imbecile that could be tyrannised over as he had been! What vileness to be always thinking about prolonging one's existence! Life is good only on the condition that it is enjoyed.
"Another piece?"
"Yes, I will."
"So will I."
"Your health."
"Yours."
"And let us laugh at the rest of the world."
They became elated. Bouvard announced that he wanted three cups of coffee, though he was not a military man. Pécuchet, with his cap over his ears, took pinch after pinch, and sneezed without fear; and, feeling the need of a little champagne, they ordered Germaine to go at once to the wine-shop to buy a bottle of it. The village was too far away; she refused. Pécuchet got indignant:
"I command you – understand! – I command you to hurry off there."
She obeyed, but, grumbling, resolved soon to have done with her masters; they were so incomprehensible and fantastic.
Then, as in former days, they went to drink their coffee and brandy on the hillock.
The harvest was just over, and the stacks in the middle of the fields rose in dark heaps against the tender blue of a calm night. Nothing was astir about the farms. Even the crickets were no longer heard. The fields were all wrapped in sleep.
The pair digested while they inhaled the breeze which blew refreshingly against their cheeks.
Above, the sky was covered with stars; some shone in clusters, others in a row, or rather alone, at certain distances from each other. A zone of luminous dust, extending from north to south, bifurcated above their heads. Amid these splendours there were vast empty spaces, and the firmament seemed a sea of azure with archipelagoes and islets.
"What a quantity!" exclaimed Bouvard.
"We do not see all," replied Pécuchet. "Behind the Milky Way are the nebulæ, and behind the nebulæ, stars still; the most distant is separated from us by three millions of myriamètres."7
He had often looked into the telescope of the Place Vendôme, and he recalled the figures.
"The sun is a million times bigger than the earth; Sirius is twelve times the size of the sun; comets measure thirty-four millions of leagues."
"'Tis enough to make one crazy!" said Bouvard.
He lamented his ignorance, and even regretted that he had not been in his youth at the Polytechnic School.
Then Pécuchet, turning him in the direction of the Great Bear, showed him the polar star; then Cassiopeia, whose constellation forms a Y; Vega, of the Lyra constellation – all scintillating; and at the lower part of the horizon, the red Aldebaran.
Bouvard, with his head thrown back, followed with difficulty the angles, quadrilaterals, and pentagons, which it is necessary to imagine in order to make yourself at home in the sky.
Pécuchet went on:
"The swiftness of light is eighty thousand leagues a second; one ray of the Milky Way takes six centuries to reach us; so that a star at the moment we observe it may have disappeared. Several are intermittent; others never come back; and they change positions. Every one of them is in motion; every one of them is passing on."
"However, the sun is motionless."
"It was believed to be so formerly. But to-day men of science declare that it rushes towards the constellation of Hercules!"
This put Bouvard's ideas out of order – and, after a minute's reflection:
"Science is constructed according to the data furnished by a corner of space. Perhaps it does not agree with all the rest that we are ignorant of, which is much vaster, and which we cannot discover."
So they talked, standing on the hillock, in the light of the stars; and their conversation was interrupted by long intervals of silence.
At last they asked one another whether there were men in the stars. Why not? And as creation is harmonious, the inhabitants of Sirius ought to be gigantic, those of Mars of middle stature, those of Venus very small. Unless it should be everywhere the same thing. There are merchants up there, and gendarmes; they trade there; they fight there; they dethrone kings there.
Some shooting stars slipped suddenly, describing on the sky, as it were, the parabola of an enormous rocket.
"Stop!" said Bouvard; "here are vanishing worlds."
Pécuchet replied:
"If ours, in its turn, kicks the bucket, the citizens of the stars will not be more moved than we are now. Ideas like this may pull down your pride."
"What is the object of all this?"
"Perhaps it has no object."
"However – " And Pécuchet repeated two or three times "however," without finding anything more to say.
"No matter. I should very much like to know how the universe is made."
"That should be in Buffon," returned Bouvard, whose eyes were closing.
"I am not equal to any more of it. I am going to bed."
The Epoques de la Nature informed them that a comet by knocking against the sun had detached one portion of it, which became the earth. First, the poles had cooled; all the waters had enveloped the globe; they subsided into the caverns; then the continents separated from each other, and the beasts and man appeared.
The majesty of creation engendered in them an amazement infinite as itself. Their heads got enlarged. They were proud of reflecting on such lofty themes.
The minerals ere long proved wearisome to them, and for distraction they sought refuge in the Harmonies of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre.
Vegetable and terrestrial harmonies, aërial, aquatic, human, fraternal, and even conjugal – every one of them is here dealt with, not omitting the invocations to Venus, to the Zephyrs, and to the Loves. They exhibited astonishment at fishes having fins, birds wings, seeds an envelope; full of that philosophy which discovers virtuous intentions in Nature, and regards her as a kind of St. Vincent de Paul, always occupied in performing acts of benevolence.
Then they wondered at her prodigies, the water-spouts, the volcanoes, the virgin forests; and they bought M. Depping's work on the Marvels and Beauties of Nature in France. Cantal possesses three of them, Hérault five, Burgundy two – no more, while Dauphiné reckons for itself alone up to fifteen marvels. But soon we shall find no more of them. The grottoes with stalactites are stopped up; the burning mountains are extinguished; the natural ice-houses have become heated; and the old trees in which they said mass are falling under the leveller's axe, or are on the point of dying.
Their curiosity next turned towards the beasts.
They re-opened their Buffon, and got into ecstasies over the strange tastes of certain animals.
But all the books are not worth one personal observation. They hurried out into the farmyard, and asked the labourers whether they had seen bulls consorting with mares, hogs seeking after cows, and the males of partridges doing strange things among themselves.
"Never in their lives." They thought such questions even a little queer for gentlemen of their age.
They took a fancy to try abnormal unions. The least difficult is that of the he-goat and the ewe. Their farmer had not a he-goat in his possession; a neighbour lent his, and, as it was the period of rutting, they shut the two beasts up in the press, concealing themselves behind the casks in order that the event might be quietly accomplished.
Each first ate a little heap of hay; then they ruminated; the ewe lay down, and she bleated continuously, while the he-goat, standing erect on his crooked legs, with his big beard and his drooping ears, fixed on her his eyes, which glittered in the shade.
At length, on the evening of the third day, they deemed it advisable to assist nature, but the goat, turning round on Pécuchet, hit him in the lower part of the stomach with his horns. The ewe, seized with fear, began turning about in the press as if in a riding-school. Bouvard ran after her, threw himself on top of her to hold her, and fell on the ground with both hands full of wool.
They renewed their experiments on hens and a drake, on a mastiff and a sow, in the hope that monsters might be the result, not understanding anything about the question of species.
This word denotes a group of individuals whose descendants reproduce themselves, but animals classed as of different species may possess the power of reproduction, while others comprised in the same species have lost the capacity. They flattered themselves that they would obtain clear ideas on this subject by studying the development of germs; and Pécuchet wrote to Dumouchel in order to get a microscope.
By turns they put on the glass surface hairs, tobacco, finger-nails, and a fly's claw, but they forgot the drop of water which is indispensable; at other times it was the little lamel, and they pushed each other forward, and put the instrument out of order; then, when they saw only a haze, they blamed the optician. They went so far as to have doubts about the microscope. Perhaps the discoveries that have been attributed to it are not so certain?
Dumouchel, in sending on the invoice to them, begged of them to collect on his account some serpent-stones and sea-urchins, of which he had always been an admirer, and which were commonly found in country districts. In order to interest them in geology he sent them the Lettres of Bertrand with the Discours of Cuvier on the revolutions of the globe.