Page:Novels of Honoré de Balzac Volume 23.djvu/116

 “It is not your fortune, but your conviction that I want. Come along,” answered Bouvard.

“Oh! you obstinate man!” cried Minoret.

The Mesmerist dragged the unbeliever into a rather dark stairway and made him go up carefully to the fourth story.

Just then an extraordinary man was making himself known in Paris, gifted by faith with an incalculable power, and making use of the magnetic powers in all their applications. Not only did this great unknown, who is yet living, himself suddenly and radically cure the most cruel and most inveterate illnesses from a distance, like the Saviour of mankind did formerly; but he would also produce the most curious instantaneous phenomena of somnambulism by mastering the most rebellious wills. The physiognomy of this stranger, who is said to depend only upon God and to communicate with the angels, like Swedenborg, resembles a lion; a concentrated, irresistible strength flashes from it. His singularly distorted features have a terrible and startling appearance; his voice, which comes from the depths of his being, is as if charged with magnetic fluid, it penetrates the hearer through every pore. Disgusted by the public ingratitude after thousands of cures, he has fallen back into impenetrable solitude, into voluntary nothingness. His all-powerful hand, which has restored dying daughters to their mothers, fathers to their weeping children, idolizing mistresses to their frenzied lovers; which has cured sick people given up by the doctors,