The only person to notice the deception as an attentive and forewarned spectator standing in the front rank of the crowd was Philibert.
That evening Philibert visited Sanson, who handed him the precious head in an innocent-looking parcel such as might easily be carried away without arousing suspicion.
On reaching his home, the financier tried to think of a way of embalming the head without risking the betrayal of his secret. Philibert was certain that, if he entrusted the task to professionals, Danton’s popular features would at once be recognized. So he decided to do everything himself and, to this end, bought several treatises on embalming, which he mastered to the best of his ability.
Once familiar with the method most commonly used, he submitted the head to a number of chemical baths and all kinds of preparations designed to assure its preservation.
Ever since then, in accordance with the great patriot’s will, these strange remains had been kept in Canterel’s family, cared for by five generations in turn.
But Philibert, too inexperienced in the art of embalming, had evidently performed his task imperfectly, for the tissues had slowly and gradually decayed away. The brain and facial muscles, however, had been spared and were still intact after a hundred years, though not the slightest vestige of flesh or skin was to be found.
Noticing the impeccable condition of the muscles and cerebral matter, Canterel was impelled by his inquiring turn of mind to spend a considerable time attempting to obtain some reflex movement from the whole head, using various electrical procedures. Success would have been extraordinarily interesting, quite as much in view of the remoteness of the time of death as for the important role in history which the subject had relinquished. But none of his efforts had borne fruit.
Now when the professor experienced a series of violent shocks on merely touching the wet cat, he wondered whether prolonged immersion in the diamond water might not induce in the celebrated head an electrification powerful enough to make the desired reflex obtainable under the transitory influence of some kind of current.
He carefully separated the brain, muscles and nerves from the legendary head, leaving all the bony part aside as a useless encumbrance; then, from a light non-conducting material, he cut a slender and ingenious frame to support the flaccid remains and hold them in their original shape.
The whole thing was plunged into the resplendent water at the end of a fine, pneumatically suspended cable, whose lower extremity ramified to grip the framework beneath the brain at three exterior points.
After a whole day willingly given up to waiting, even the tiniest filaments were covered with aqueous sheaths, like thicker versions of those already collected by Faustine’s hair and the fur of Khóng-d
k-lèn.
Canterel removed the peculiar object and took it to one of his laboratories, where he passed a strong electric current through the brain; to his great delight he obtained several almost imperceptible twitches form the nerves that had once worked the lower lip.
Certain that he was now on the right track, he made persistent efforts to achieve greater results, but in vain. The reflex, changing its position, was no more than a barely perceptible shudder which fleetingly disturbed one or another region of the face.
Canterel could not content himself with such a feeble triumph and determined to pass a current through the head while it was actually submerged in the water’s blinding depths; for he considered, correctly, that the electricity stored at high tension in that astonishing liquid, enveloping the brain and fibers on every side, would surely tend to increase their magnetic power.
Once more he inundated the head in the great diamond, then, stationed at the ladder’s top, he placed a charged battery on the reentrant edge, the wires of which plunged down into the depths to make contact with the cerebral lobes.
The results were far superior to the previous ones; the labial nerves appeared to be attempting certain words, while the muscles of the eyes and eyebrows fluttered.
Fired with enthusiasm, the professor repeated the experiment over and over again: it was always the buccal region that went most vigorously into action. All the evidence suggested that, from a kind of habit, the brain had a predilection for operating the lips, on account of the amazing fluency for which the splendid orator had been chiefly distinguished throughout his life.
When he saw the reserve of latent energy retained, despite the passage of time, in the strange agglomeration of cells, Canterel drove himself to obtain as many effects as possible from them, at their maximum intensity. But for all his trials with various kinds of currents, constantly stepping up the power of the batteries employed, the still-immersed subfacies yielded only the same trembling of the eyes and vague sketches of words that he had noted since the first test made in the aqua-micans’s depths. The professor began to search elsewhere for some power capable of drawing greater advantage from the precious human relic he was fortunate enough to possess.
Then he recalled to mind some of his own earlier work on animal magnetism. He remembered a red substance he had invented — and christened erythrite — which, taken in quantities the size of a pinhead, would electrify the subject’s tissues, spreading through them and transforming him into a veritable live battery. To concentrate all the electricity stored in the patient’s body, it was only necessary to put his face into the mouth of a special kind of large metal horn, perforated by a few air holes; then, merely by its contact, the point of the cone was able to produce a given current or work a motor. Since this discovery had lent itself to no practical application, the professor had promptly put it aside — keeping, however, the formula of the erythrite, which he considered using afterward in his fresh experiments.
And this animal magnetism did indeed seem marked out for the accomplishment of a semi-biological experiment aimed at some kind of artificial resurrection. But the poor quality of the physiognomical reflexes so far provided by the most powerful batteries showed that only an enormous dose of erythrite would work effectively. Now the consumption of an excessive quantity of the red medicine would involve serious dangers, so that it could only be tested on an animal.
Remembering how easily Khóng-dk-lèn had taught himself to move about in the respiratory water, Canterel determined to use the cat’s intelligence and obvious ability in some kind of prompt initiation. However, before attempting anything, he had to get rid of the thick white fur, since it was too prone to become electrified and would inevitably have produced a multiplicity of cross-currents prejudicial to the end in view. A highly active coating, with which he covered the animal’s whole body, caused all its fur to fall out painlessly by the roots.
The professor then constructed a horn, from the appropriate metal, that exactly fitted the muzzle of the cat. It had several holes bored in it here and there to enable the feline to look out and at the same time permit continual movement of the aqua-micans inside the cone where, consequently, fresh oxygen would always by circulating.
Henceforth a bizarre, pink creature, Khóng-dk-lèn, with the metal horn encircling his muzzle, was once more engulfed in the great diamond. Without as yet giving him a single atom of erythrite, Canterel patiently trained him to touch Danton’s brain gently with the tip of the cone. The cat soon grasped what was required of him and, with the aid of a few paw movements, found it easy to poise himself between two layers of water. Such was the delicacy with which he was able, before long, to contact the freely suspended head that it received no oscillatory impulse to speak of. The professor also taught him to remove the horn unaided, using his forepaws — then to pick it up from the bottom of the container by putting his muzzle into it while its point rested against the back of one of the facets.
Once these various results had been obtained, Canterel compounded a supply of erythrite. But instead of dividing the substance up into infinitesimal fractions as he had done before, he made it into strong pills in which the former dose was multiplied a hundredfold, so that a serious danger threatened Khóng-dk-lèn. The professor prudently divided up the first capsule and trained the animal progressively by giving him small amounts at first, then increasing the ration day by day.
On the first occasion that the cat swallowed an entire pill, Canterel plunged him into the radiant aquarium. Then, after allowing a few minutes for the erythrite to take effect, he gave a special signal of command. The perfectly trained Khóng-dk-lèn at once went to the bottom to mask himself with the horn, then swam to Danton’s brain and brushed it with the tip of his metallic accessory. Joyfully, the professor saw his hopes completely realized. Under the influence of the powerful animal magnetism which the cone released, the facial muscles trembled and the fleshless lips began to move distinctly, vigorously pronouncing strings of noiseless words. By lip-reading, Canterel managed to make out various syllables just from the way they were articulated; then he discovered chaotic snatches of speech following one another disconnectedly or, sometimes, repeated ad nauseam with strange insistence.
Dazzled by such success, Canterel repeated the experiment at various intervals, submerging the cat beforehand and accustoming him to swallow a carelessly thrown capsule of erythrite, which he snapped up in the water as it sank.
∗ ∗ ∗
Dreaming of some further application of the aqua-micans, the professor conceived the notion of making, for the great diamond’s interior, a collection of Cartesian divers capable of rising to the surface automatically by means of an air pocket in each of them in which a portion of the oxygen so abundantly diffused in their environment would gradually be accumulated — then, when the gas collected in this way was suddenly released, they would descend again to the bottom.
A cunning mechanism, adapted to each aquatic figurine, was to be set in motion by the abrupt discharge of oxygen in order to produce movement or any other phenomenon — or, again, a short, characteristic sentence written in fine, graphically arranged air bubbles.
After searching his memory, Canterel selected a variety of episodes likely to provide him with curious subjects to depict.
1. An adventure from the life of Alexander the Great narrated by Flavius Arrian.
In 331 bc, at the time of his victorious march through Babylonia, Alexander had greatly admired an enormous and magnificent bird with green plumage belonging to the satrap Seodyr, who kept it permanently beside him in his room with its foot imprisoned in a long golden thread fixed to the wall.
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