Page:Novels of Honoré de Balzac Volume 23.djvu/112

 but the Revolution put a stop to these discoveries which gave success to the cause of the scholars and mockers. A few doctors were amongst the believers. Until their death these dissenters were persecuted by their fellow-physicians. The respectable body of Paris doctors displayed all the harshness of the religious wars towards the Mesmerists, and were as cruel in their hatred for them as it was possible to be in that time of Voltairean tolerance. The orthodox doctors refused to consult with those doctors who favored the Mesmeric heresy. In 1820, these so-called arch-heretics were still the object of this secret proscription. The miseries and storms of the Revolution did not extinguish this scientific hatred. Only priests, magistrates and doctors can hate like that. The gown is always terrible. But are not ideas also much more implacable than things? Doctor Bouvard, one of Minoret’s friends, believed in the new faith, and persisted until his death in the science to which he had sacrificed his peace in life, for he was one of the bêtes-noires of the Faculty of Paris. Minoret, one of the stoutest upholders of the Encyclopedists, the most formidable enemy of Deslon, Mesmer’s provost, and whose pen carried enormous weight in this dispute, quarreled irrevocably with his fellow-physician; he went even further, and persecuted him. His treatment of Bouvard was to cause him the only regret that troubled the serenity of his declining age. Since Doctor Minoret’s retirement to Nemours, the science of imponderables, the only name that tallies with