The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo [96]
Coictier calmed himself, muttering,—
“After all, he’s a madman!”
“Odzooks, Master Claude!” continued Tourangeau, after a pause, “you embarrass me mightily. I had two pieces of advice to ask of you,—one concerning my health, the other concerning my star.”
“Sir,” responded the archdeacon, “if that be your object, you would have done as well not to waste your breath in climbing my stairs. I am no believer in medicine: I am no believer in astrology.”
“Indeed!” said the stranger with surprise.
Coictier laughed a forced laugh.
“You see now that he’s mad,” he whispered to Compere Tourangeau. “He doesn’t believe in astrology.”
“How can any one imagine,” continued Dom Claude, “that every star-ray is a thread which leads to some man’s head!”
“Pray, in what do you believe, then?” exclaimed Tourangeau.
The archdeacon for an instant seemed uncertain, then with a gloomy smile, which seemed to belie his answer, said: “credo in Deum.”
“Dominum nostrum,” added Tourangeau, making the sign of the cross.
“Amen,” said Coictier.
“Reverend sir,” resumed the stranger, “I am delighted to find you so good a Christian. But, great scholar that you are, have you reached such a point that you no longer believe in science?”
“No,” said the archdeacon, seizing Tourangeau by the arm, while a lightning flash of enthusiasm kindled his dull eye,—“no, I do not deny science. I have not crawled flat on my face all these years, digging the earth with my nails, amid the countless mazes of the cavern, without seeing far before me, at the end of the dark tunnel, a light, a flame, something, doubtless the reflection of the dazzling central laboratory where sages and patient souls have taken God by surprise.”
“Come, then,” interrupted Tourangeau, “what do you consider true and certain?”
“Alchemy.”
Coictier cried out: “Good God, Dom Claude! alchemy has its good points, no doubt; but why should you blaspheme against medicine and astrology?”
“Your science of mankind is naught; your science of heaven naught!” said the archdeacon, authoritatively.
“You treat Epidaurus and Chaldea very cavalierly,” replied the doctor with a sneer.
“Hear me, Master Jacques. I speak in good faith. I am not the king’s physician, and his Majesty did not give me the Dædalus garden as a convenient spot whence I might study the constellations. Don’t be angry, and listen to me. What new truth did you ever derive,—I don’t say from medicine, which is far too foolish a matter, but from astrology? Tell me the virtues of the vertical boustrophedon,bu the discoveries of the number Ziruph and the number Zephirod.”
“Would you deny,” said Coictier, “the sympathetic power of the clavicle, and that the Cabala is derived from it?”
“An error, Master Jacques! None of your formulæ lead to reality; while alchemy has its indubitable discoveries. Can you contest such results as these,—ice buried beneath the ground for a thousand years is transformed to rock crystal; lead is the progenitor of all the metals,—for gold is not a metal, gold is light; lead requires but four periods of two hundred years each to pass successively from the state of lead to the state of red arsenic, from red arsenic to tin, from tin to silver? Are these facts or are they not? But to believe in clavicles, planets, and stars is as absurd as to believe with the natives of far Cathay that the golden oriole turns into a mole, and grains of wheat into mollusks of the genus Cypræa!”
“I have studied hermetics,” cried Coictier, “and I affirm—” The fiery archdeacon did not permit him to finish his speech. “And I have studied medicine, astrology, and hermetics. Here alone is truth [as he spoke he took from the press a phial filled with the powder of which we spoke some pages back], here alone is light! Hippocrates is a dream; Urania is a dream; Hermes is a mere idea. Gold is the sun; to make gold, is to become God. This is the only wisdom. I have sounded the depths of medicine and astrology, I tell you. They are naught, naught! The human body is a mere shadow; the stars are shadows!”
And he fell back upon his seat