which were then unknown (Widal not yet having made his discoveries). For, medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners, when we summon the wisest of them to our aid the chances are that we may be relying on a scientific truth the error of which will be recognised in a few years’ time. So that to believe in medicine would be the height of folly, if not to believe in it were not a greater folly still, for from this mass of errors a few truths have in the long run emerged. Cottard had told us to take her temperature. A thermometer was fetched. Almost throughout its entire length the tube was empty of mercury. One could scarcely make out, nestling at the bottom of its trough, the silver salamander. It seemed dead. The little glass pipe was slipped into my grandmother’s mouth. We had no need to leave it there for long; the little sorceress had not been slow in casting her horoscope. We found her motionless, perched half-way up her tower and declining to move, showing us with precision the figure that we had asked of her, a figure with which all the most careful thought that my grandmother’s mind might have devoted to herself would have been incapable of furnishing her: 101°. For the first time we felt some anxiety. We shook the thermometer well, to erase the ominous sign, as though we were able thus to reduce the patient’s fever simultaneously with the temperature indicated. Alas, it was only too clear that the little sibyl, bereft of reason though she was, had not pronounced judgment arbitrarily, for the next day, scarcely had the thermometer been inserted between my grandmother’s lips when almost at once, as though with a single bound, exulting in her certainty and in her intuition of a fact that to us was imperceptible, the little prophetess had come to a halt at the same point, in an implacable immobility, and pointed once again to that figure 101 with the tip of her gleaming wand. She said nothing else; in vain had we longed, wished, prayed, she was deaf to our entreaties; it seemed as though this were her final word, a warning and a threat.
Then, in an attempt to constrain her to modify her response, we had recourse to another creature of the same kingdom, but more potent, a creature not content with questioning the body but capable of commanding it, a febrifuge of the same order as the modern aspirin, which had not then come into use. We had not brought the thermometer down below 99.5, in the hope that it would not have to rise from there. We made my grandmother swallow this drug and then replaced the thermometer in her mouth. Like an implacable warder to whom one presents a permit signed by a higher authority whose patronage one enjoys, and who, finding it to be in order, replies: “All right, I’ve nothing to say; if that’s how it is you may pass,” this time the vigilant out-sister did not move. But sullenly she seemed to be saying: “What good will it do you? Since you know quinine, she may give me the order not to go up once, ten times, twenty times. And then she’ll grow tired of telling me, I know her, believe me. This won’t last for ever. And then where will it have got you?”
Thereupon my grandmother felt the presence within her of a being who knew the human body better than she; the presence of a contemporary of the races that have vanished from the earth, the presence of earth’s first inhabitant—far earlier than the creation of thinking man; she felt that primeval ally probing in her head, her heart, her elbow; he was reconnoitring the ground, organising everything for the prehistoric combat which began at once to be fought. In a moment, a crushed Python, the fever was vanquished by the potent chemical element to which my grandmother, across all the kingdoms, reaching out beyond all animal and vegetable life, would have liked to be able to give thanks. And she remained moved by this glimpse which she had caught, through the mists of so many centuries, of an element anterior to the creation even of plants. Meanwhile the thermometer, like one of the Parcae momentarily