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 CHAPTER VII

ST. MARK'S BALSAM

The death of the great king, and the first transactions of the Regency, left little leisure to Abbé Malletort for the thousand occupations of his every-day life. With the busy churchman, to stagnate was a cessation of existence. As some men study bodily health and vigour, carefully attending to the development of their frames by constant and unremitting exercise, so did the Abbé preserve his intellect in the highest possible training by its varied use, and seemed to grudge the loss of every hour in which he either omitted to learn something new or lay a fresh stepping-stone for the employment of knowledge previously acquired. Like Juvenal's Greek, he studied all the sciences in turn, but his labour was never without an object, nor had he the slightest scruples in applying its results to his own advantage. Malletort was qualified to deal with the most consummate knave, but he might have been unconsciously out-*manœuvred by a really honest man, simply from his own habitual disregard of the maxim, as true in ethics as in mathematics, which teaches that the shortest way from any one given point to another is a straight line.

The Abbé had therefore many irons in his fire, careful, however, so to hold them that he should preserve his own fingers from being burnt; and amongst others, he often applied his spare hours to the study of chemistry.

Now in the time of which I am speaking the tree of knowledge had not been entirely denuded of its parasite credulity. Science and superstition were not yet finally divorced, and the philosopher's stone was still eagerly sought