“These are the facts.—­I should very much like to know what our College of Medicine would say if each of its members in turn were subjected to this influence, which leaves no loophole for incredulity.

“My old friend—­this doctor,” said Doctor Lebrun parenthetically, “is an old man persecuted for his opinions since Mesmer’s time by all the faculty; he is seventy or seventy-two years of age, and his name is Bouvard.  At the present day he is the patriarchal representative of the theory of animal magnetism.  This good man regards me as a son; I owe my training to him.—­Well, this worthy old Bouvard it was who proposed to prove to me that nerve-force put in motion by the magnetizer was, not indeed infinite, for man is under immutable laws, but a power acting like other powers of nature whose elemental essence escapes our observation.

“‘For instance,’ said he, ’if you place your hand in that of a somnambulist who, when awake, can press it only up to a certain average of tightness, you will see that in the somnambulistic state —­as it is stupidly termed—­his fingers can clutch like a vise screwed up by a blacksmith.’—­Well, monsieur, I placed my hand in that of a woman, not asleep, for Bouvard rejects the word, but isolated, and when the old man bid her squeeze my wrist as long and as tightly as she could, I begged him to stop when the blood was almost bursting from my finger tips.  Look, you can see the marks of her clutch, which I shall not lose for these three months.”

“The deuce!” exclaimed Monsieur Gault, as he saw a band of bruised flesh, looking like the scar of a burn.

“My dear Gault,” the doctor went on, “if my wrist had been gripped in an iron manacle screwed tight by a locksmith, I should not have felt the bracelet of metal so hard as that woman’s fingers; her hand was of unyielding steel, and I am convinced that she could have crushed my bones and broken my hand from the wrist.  The pressure, beginning almost insensibly, increased without relaxing, fresh force being constantly added to the former grip; a tourniquet could not have been more effectual than that hand used as an instrument of torture.—­To me, therefore, it seems proven that under the influence of passion, which is the will concentrated on one point and raised to an incalculable power of animal force, as the different varieties of electric force are also, man may direct his whole vitality, whether for attack or resistance, to one of his organs.—­Now, this little lady, under the stress of her despair, had concentrated her vital force in her hands.”

“She must have a good deal too, to break a wrought-iron bar,” said the chief warder, with a shake of the head.

“There was a flaw in it,” Monsieur Gault observed.

“For my part,” said the doctor, “I dare assign no limits to nervous force.  And indeed it is by this that mothers, to save their children, can magnetize lions, climb, in a fire, along a parapet where a cat would not venture, and endure the torments that sometimes attend childbirth.  In this lies the secret of the attempts made by convicts and prisoners to regain their liberty.  The extent of our vital energies is as yet unknown; they are part of the energy of nature itself, and we draw them from unknown reservoirs.”