For the first time events ran contrary to the sweat’s prediction.

Then those who had witnessed the dwarf during his sweating crisis scented some trick and were suspicious after that of his supposedly feverish behavior. Compelling him to show his body, they discovered the scars left where he had deliberately gashed himself.

When the subterfuge was made public a huge outcry arose against the impostor who had aggravated the people’s present misery before­hand by extorting magnificent gifts. However, superstition preserved Pizzighini from any reprisal; no action was taken against him, for it was generally believed that, like some fetish, he could still cause much fine agricultural yield in the future. The people merely resolved to keep a closer watch henceforth on the appearance of the vermilion sweat.

So the dwarf, laughing up his sleeve, continued openly and impudently to squander the goods acquired by his cunning, while the whole land groaned. Nevertheless he remained extremely pale and exhausted, and his mien was spectral as he devoted himself to his customary incessant orgies.

Next year, when spring came round as usual, Pizzighini lay down on his bed, this time under close surveillance. But the crimson humectation was awaited in vain. The freak, who had remained anemic since his frightful hemorrhage, was no longer capable of producing the strange cutaneous phenomenon which until then had occurred, to a varying extent, so regularly.

He received no gifts.

Now at the end of four months a magnificent and most abundant harvest was garnered, proving the dwarf’s incapacity as a prophet.

After that, Pizzighini, killer of the golden goose, was destined to solitude and contempt, and lived in hopeless destitution. For his blood never recovered, and the annual diaphoresis never again made its appearance.

5. A passage in mythology according to which Atlas, exhausted with fatigue, one day let the celestial sphere fall from his shoulders and then, like a fractious child, aimed a terrible kick at the importunate burden that he was condemned to carry for all eternity. The disturbing intervention of his heel, which landed in the middle of Capricorn, explained the extraordinarily incoherent shape which the stars of this constellation have presented ever since.

6. An anecdote concerning Voltaire, taken from the correspondence of Frederick the Great.

In the autumn of 1775, Voltaire, then over eighty and at the height of his fame, was Frederick’s guest at Sans-Souci.

One day the two friends were walking in the neighborhood of the royal residence, and Frederick was allowing himself to be beguiled by his illustrious companion’s lively conversation, as the latter, filled with enthusiasm, expounded his uncompromisingly anti-religious doctrines with wit and ardor.

Forgetful of the time as they talked, at sunset the strolling couple found themselves deep in the country. Voltaire had just launched into a particularly virulent tirade against the old dogmas that he had fought so long.

Suddenly he fell silent in the middle of a sentence, rooted to the ground in the throes of some deep distress.

Not far from him a girl, hardly out of puberty, had just knelt down at the tolling of a distant bell sounding the angelus from the top of a little Catholic chapel. With hands joined and eyes turned heavenward, she fervently recited a Latin prayer aloud — and so swiftly did her ecstasy bear her away to the region of dreams and light that she was unaware of the presence of the two strangers.

Voltaire gazed at her with unspeakable anguish, which suffused the yellowed parchment of his face with a more than usually ashen hue. His features were contorted with a terrible emotion while, under the influence of the sacred language of the prayer he heard, the Latin word “Dubito” escaped his lips involuntarily, like a response.

This doubt clearly referred to his own atheistic theories. It was as though, on seeing the unearthly expression on the girl’s face as she prayed, he had received a revelation of the afterlife — as if, at the approach of death, which at his age was necessarily not far off, his whole being was possessed by the terror of eternal punishment.

This crisis only lasted a moment. Once more the great sceptic’s lips were pursed in irony and the sentence he had begun ended on a mordant note.

But he had been shaken, and Frederick was never to forget his brief and precious glimpse of Voltaire experiencing a mystical emotion.

7. An event which has a direct bearing on Richard Wagner’s genius.

On 17th October 1813, at Leipzig, the terrible struggle which had commenced the previous day, and which was to continue so relentlessly during the two days following, was interrupted by a truce between the French and the Allied forces.

On an outer boulevard was a crowd of mountebanks and itinerant pedlars such as always follow in the wake of armies. A number of townsmen were there mingling with the soldiers, and the whole scene had an air of liveliness which gave it rather the aspect of a fair.

A bevy of young women strolled gaily about in the throng, much entertained by the tinseled stalls and the showmen’s patter; one of them was carrying a son about five months old, who was none other than Richard Wagner, born at Leipzig on the 22nd of the preceding May.

Suddenly an old man with long hair, standing near a small table, called out to the young mother from afar, inviting her to have the child’s fortune told. The man, whose appearance and accent were as French as could be, expressed himself in such comic, laborious German that the cheerful strollers burst out laughing; he felt then that he had won his case, and it took only a little persuasion to bring their group over to him. With an air of mystery the old man examined the child, then took from the table a flat-bottomed cup in which a layer of bright iron filings lay evenly distributed.

Himself holding the object by its base, he requested the young mother to strike its edge three times with her finger, while thinking of her son’s destiny. She passively complied and gave the required three knocks with the tip of her forefinger, without letting go of her living bundle. The charlatan carefully set the cup down and put on an enormous pair of spectacles to examine the movements and perturbations caused by the triple blow in the hitherto perfectly smooth surface.

Suddenly he threw up his hands in amazement and, espying a writing case in front of him, took a blank sheet of paper and copied, in ink, the strange shape traced in the powdered metal. Then he handed the paper to the young woman who saw, in French the words “Will be pilfered” — legible enough, despite the jumbled outlines of the letters, which were of very unequal size and sloped in all directions. The charlatan at the same time pointed to the cup, drawing attention to the exact resemblance between the original and the copy — and indeed, as a consequence of the knocks, a very narrow, contorted furrow had been hollowed in the iron filings, forming the words transcribed.

The old man translated the short phrase into the Teutonic tongue for his client and made every effort in his bad German to explain its significance to her. According to him, this laconic expression contained the seeds of the most exalted destiny among the arts and could only apply to some great innovator capable of giving rise to a pleiad of imitators as the founder of a school.

The happy mother, being rather superstitious, paid the fortune-teller generously and took away the piece of paper, which she kept as a precious document. Later she made a present of it to her son, telling him of the adventure in which he had once unconsciously figured as the hero.

Toward the end of Wagner’s life, when his works, known and understood at last, had already fallen prey to a host of unscrupulous plagiarists, he liked to tell the story — admitting that the prediction, by then so completely fulfilled, had had a beneficial effect on his whole career by giving him a superstitious encouragement during the long years of disappointments and fruitless struggles, when he was often in despair.

Once Canterel had fixed on these various subjects, he had the Cartesian divers constructed according to certain precise specifications. Each was to have a judiciously weighted base, in order to give it a constant equilibrium, and a small interior cavity treated with a special metal designed to attract and chemically isolate from its immediate vicinity the excess oxygen dispersed through the aqua-micans. Gradually, as the cavity filled with gas, the diver would become lighter and rise of its own accord from the bottom toward the surface. But when the oxygen reached a certain pressure, exactly ten seconds after the calculated beginning of the ascent, it would burst out of its tiny cavern — whose upper part, momentarily lifting like a lid, would enable the whole bubble to escape to the exterior. This was to set in motion a special mechanism causing some action in the diver related to the event that had inspired it.