Part 45

“I am not joking,” the Marquis answered, laying the piece of skin before him.

Baron Japhet applied the nervous fibres of his tongue to the skin; he had skill in thus detecting salts, acids, alkalis, and gases. After several experiments, he remarked:

“No taste whatever! Come, we will give it a little fluoric acid to drink.”

Subjected to the influence of this ready solvent of animal tissue, the skin underwent no change whatsoever.

“It is not shagreen at all!” the chemist cried. “We will treat this unknown mystery as a mineral, and try its mettle by dropping it in a crucible where I have at this moment some red potash.”

Japhet went out, and returned almost immediately.

“Allow me to cut away a bit of this strange substance, sir,” he said to Raphael; “it is so extraordinary----”

“A bit!” exclaimed Raphael; “not so much as a hair’s-breadth. You may try, though,” he added, half banteringly, half sadly.

The chemist broke a razor in his desire to cut the skin; he tried to break it by a powerful electric shock; next he submitted it to the influence of a galvanic battery; but all the thunderbolts his science wotted of fell harmless on the dreadful talisman.

It was seven o’clock in the evening. Planchette, Japhet, and Raphael, unaware of the flight of time, were awaiting the outcome of a final experiment. The Magic Skin emerged triumphant from a formidable encounter in which it had been engaged with a considerable quantity of chloride of nitrogen.

“It is all over with me,” Raphael wailed. “It is the finger of God! I shall die!----” and he left the two amazed scientific men.

“We must be very careful not to talk about this affair at the Academie; our colleagues there would laugh at us,” Planchette remarked to the chemist, after a long pause, in which they looked at each other without daring to communicate their thoughts. The learned pair looked like two Christians who had issued from their tombs to find no God in the heavens. Science had been powerless; acids, so much clear water; red potash had been discredited; the galvanic battery and electric shock had been a couple of playthings.

“A hydraulic press broken like a biscuit!” commented Planchette.

“I believe in the devil,” said the Baron Japhet, after a moment’s silence.

“And I in God,” replied Planchette.

Each spoke in character. The universe for a mechanician is a machine that requires an operator; for chemistry--that fiendish employment of decomposing all things--the world is a gas endowed with the power of movement.

“We cannot deny the fact,” the chemist replied.

“Pshaw! those gentlemen the doctrinaires have invented a nebulous aphorism for our consolation--Stupid as a fact.”

“Your aphorism,” said the chemist, “seems to me as a fact very stupid.”

They began to laugh, and went off to dine like folk for whom a miracle is nothing more than a phenomenon.

Valentin reached his own house shivering with rage and consumed with anger. He had no more faith in anything. Conflicting thoughts shifted and surged to and fro in his brain, as is the case with every man brought face to face with an inconceivable fact. He had readily believed in some hidden flaw in Spieghalter’s apparatus; he had not been surprised by the incompetence and failure of science and of fire; but the flexibility of the skin as he handled it, taken with its stubbornness when all means of destruction that man possesses had been brought to bear upon it in vain--these things terrified him. The incontrovertible fact made him dizzy.

“I am mad,” he muttered. “I have had no food since the morning, and yet I am neither hungry nor thirsty, and there is a fire in my breast that burns me.”

He put back the skin in the frame where it had been enclosed but lately, drew a line in red ink about the actual configuration of the talisman, and seated himself in his armchair.

“Eight o’clock already!” he exclaimed. “To-day has gone like a dream.”

He leaned his elbow on the arm of the chair, propped his head with his left hand, and so remained, lost in secret dark reflections and consuming thoughts that men condemned to die bear away with them.

“O Pauline!” he cried. “Poor child! there are gulfs that love can never traverse, despite the strength of his wings.”

Just then he very distinctly heard a smothered sigh, and knew by one of the most tender privileges of passionate love that it was Pauline’s breathing.

“That is my death warrant,” he said to himself. “If she were there, I should wish to die in her arms.”