Page:Novels of Honoré de Balzac Volume 23.djvu/113

 magnetism, which is so closely allied by the nature of its phenomena to light and electricity, was making immense progress, in spite of the ceaseless jeers of Parisian science. Phrenology and physiognomy, twin sciences of Gall and Lavater, of which one is to the other what cause is to effect, proved to the eyes of more than one physiologist the traces of an imperceptible fluid, the base of the phenomena of the human will, the source of the passions and habits, the forms of face and those of the skull. In short, magnetic facts, and somnambulistic miracles, those of divination and entrancement which permitted penetration into the spiritual world, were accumulating. The strange and well-established story of the apparitions of farmer Martin, and this peasant’s interview with Louis XVIII.; the knowledge of Swedenborg’s relations with the dead, so seriously established in Germany; Walter Scott’s accounts of the effects of second sight; the exercise of the prodigious faculties of several fortune-tellers who jumble up chiromancy, cartomancy and horoscopy into one science; the feats of catalepsy and those of the working of the properties of the diaphragm by certain morbid affections; these phenomena, all emanating from the same source and at least curious, were undermining many doubts and leading the most indifferent to the ground of experiment. Minoret knew nothing of this march of intelligence, so great in the north of Europe, still so feeble in France, where those facts were nevertheless taking place, which were styled marvelous by superficial