The Mesmerist's Victim

BALSAMO was punctual and found, at six o’clock, Marat and his servant, a woman of all work, decking up the room with flowers in a vase in honor of the visitor. At sight of the master, the surgeon blushed more plainly than was becoming in a stoic.

“Where are we first going?” asked Balsamo when they got down to the street door.

“To Surgeon’ Hall,” was the reply. “I have selected a corpse there, a subject which died of acute meningitis; I have to make some observations on the brain and do not wish my colleagues to cut it up before I do.”

“Let us to the hall, then.”

“It is only a couple of steps; besides, you need not go in; you might wait for me at the door.”

“On the contrary, I want to go in with you and have your opinion on the subject, since it is a dead body.”

“Take care,” said Marat; “For I am an expert anatomist and have the advantage of you there.”

“Pride, more pride,” muttered the Italian.

“What is that?”

“I say that we shall see about that. Let us enter.”

Balsamo followed him without shrinking into the amphitheatre, on Hautefeuille Street. On a marble slab in the long, narrow hall were two corpses, a man’s and a woman’s. She had died young: he was old and bald; a wornout sheet veiled their bodies but half exposed their faces.

Side by side on the chilly bed, they might never have met in life and if their souls could see them now, they would have been mutually surprised at the neighborhood.

Marat pulled off the shroud of coarse linen from the two unfortunates equalised by death under the surgeon’s knife. They were nude.

“Is not the sight repugnant to you?” asked Marat with his usual braggadocia.

“It makes me sad,” replied the other.

“From not being habituated to it,” said the dissector. “I see the thing daily and I feel neither sadness nor dislike. We surgical practitioners have to live with the lifeless and we do not on their account interrupt any of the functions of our life.”

“It is a sad privilege of your profession.”

“And why should I feel in the matter? Against sadness, I have reflection; against the other thing, habit. What is to frighten me in a corpse, a statue of flesh instead of stone?”

“As you say, in a corpse there is nothing, while in the living body there is – ”

“Motion,” replied Marat loftily.

“You have not spoken of the soul.”

“I have never come across it when I searched with my scalpel.”

“Because you searched the dead only.”

“Oh, I have probed living bodies.”

“But have met nothing more than in dead ones?”

“Yes, pain; you don’t call that the soul, do you?”

“Do you not believe in the soul?”

“I believe in it but I may call it the Moving Power, if I like.”

“Very well; all I ask is if you believe in the soul; it makes me happy to think so.”

“Stop an instant, master,” interrupted Marat with his viper-like smile: “let us come to an understanding and not exaggerate; we surgical operators are rather materialists.”

“These bodies are quite cold,” mused Balsamo aloud, “and this woman was good-looking. A fine soul must have dwelt in that fine temple.”

“There was the mistake – it was a vile blade of metal in that showy scabbard. This body, master, is that of a drab who was taken from the Magdalen Prison of St. Lazare where she died of brain fever, to the Main Hospital. Her story is very scandalous and long. If you call her moving impulse a soul, you do ours wrong.”

“The soul might have been healed and it was lost, because no physician for the soul came along.”

“Alas, master, this is another of your theories. Only for bodies are there medicines,” sneered Marat with a bitter laugh. “You use words which are a reflection of a part of ‘Macbeth,’ and it makes you smile. Who can minister to a mind diseased? Shakespeare calls your ‘sou’ the mind.”

“No, you are wrong, and you do not know why I smile. For the moment we are to conclude that these earthly vessels are empty?”

“And senseless,” went on Marat, raising the head of the woman and letting it fall down on the slab with a bang, without the remains shuddering or moving.

“Very well: let us go to the hospital now,” said Balsamo.

“Not until I have cut off the head and put it by, as this coveted head is the seat of a curious malady.”

He opened his instrument-case, took out a bistory, and picked up in a corner a mallet spotted with blood. With a skilled hand he traced a circular incision separating all the flesh and neck muscles. Cleaving to the spine, he thrust his steel between two joints and gave with the maul a sharp, forcible rap. The head rolled on the table, and bounced to the ground. Marat was obliged to pick it up with his moistened hands. Balsamo turned his head not to fill the operator with too much delight.

“One of these days,” said the latter, thinking he had caught his superior in a weak moment, “some philanthropist who ponders over death as I do over life will invent a machine to chop off the head to bring about instantaneous extinction of the vital spark, which is not done by any means of execution now in practice. The rack, the garrote the rope, these are all methods of torture appertaining to barbarous peoples and not to the civilized. An enlightened nation like France ought to punish and not revenge: for the society which racks, strangles and decapitates by the sword inflicts punishment by the pain besides that of death alone, the culprit’s portion. This is overdoing the penalty by half, I think.”

“It is my opinion, too. What idea do you have of such an instrument?”

“A machine, cold and emotionless as the Law itself; the man charged with the inflection is affected by the sight of the criminal in his own likeness; and he misses his stroke, as at the beheading of Chalais and of the Duke of Monmouth. A machine would not do that, say, a wooden arm which brought down an ax on the neck.”

“I have seen something of the kind in operation, the Maiden, it is called in Scotland, and the Mannaja, in Italy. But I have also seen the decapitated criminals rise without their heads, from the seat on which they were placed, and stagger off a dozen paces. I have picked up such heads, by the hair, as you just did that one which tumbled off the table, and when I uttered in the ear the name with which it was baptized, I saw the eyes open to see who called and showed that still on the earth it had quitted one could cry after what was passing from time to eternity.”

“Merely a nervous movement.”

“Are not the nerves the organs of sense? I conclude that it would be better for man, instead of seeking a machine to kill without pain for punishment, he had better seek the way to punish without killing. The society that discovers that will be the best and most enlightened.”

“Another Utopia!” exclaimed Marat.

“Perhaps you are right, this once,” responded Balsamo. “It is time that will enlighten us.”

Marat wrapped up the female head in his handkerchief which he tied by the four corners in a knot.

“In this way, I am sure that my colleagues will not rob me of my head,” he said.

Walking side by side the dreamer and the practitioner went to the great Hospital.