



Produced by Dagny





THE ATHEIST'S MASS


By Honore De Balzac


Translated by Clara Bell



This is dedicated to Auguste Borget by his friend De Balzac





THE ATHEIST'S MASS


Bianchon, a physician to whom science owes a fine system of theoretical
physiology, and who, while still young, made himself a celebrity in the
medical school of Paris, that central luminary to which European doctors
do homage, practised surgery for a long time before he took up medicine.
His earliest studies were guided by one of the greatest of French
surgeons, the illustrious Desplein, who flashed across science like a
meteor. By the consensus even of his enemies, he took with him to the
tomb an incommunicable method. Like all men of genius, he had no heirs;
he carried everything in him, and carried it away with him. The glory of
a surgeon is like that of an actor: they live only so long as they are
alive, and their talent leaves no trace when they are gone. Actors
and surgeons, like great singers too, like the executants who by their
performance increase the power of music tenfold, are all the heroes of a
moment.

Desplein is a case in proof of this resemblance in the destinies of
such transient genius. His name, yesterday so famous, to-day almost
forgotten, will survive in his special department without crossing its
limits. For must there not be some extraordinary circumstances to exalt
the name of a professor from the history of Science to the general
history of the human race? Had Desplein that universal command of
knowledge which makes a man the living word, the great figure of his
age? Desplein had a godlike eye; he saw into the sufferer and his malady
by an intuition, natural or acquired, which enabled him to grasp the
diagnostics peculiar to the individual, to determine the very time,
the hour, the minute when an operation should be performed, making due
allowance for atmospheric conditions and peculiarities of individual
temperament. To proceed thus, hand in hand with nature, had he then
studied the constant assimilation by living beings, of the elements
contained in the atmosphere, or yielded by the earth to man who absorbs
them, deriving from them a particular expression of life? Did he work
it all out by the power of deduction and analogy, to which we owe the
genius of Cuvier? Be this as it may, this man was in all the secrets of
the human frame; he knew it in the past and in the future, emphasizing
the present.

But did he epitomize all science in his own person as Hippocrates did
and Galen and Aristotle? Did he guide a whole school towards new worlds?
No. Though it is impossible to deny that this persistent observer of
human chemistry possessed that antique science of the Mages, that is
to say, knowledge of the elements in fusion, the causes of life, life
antecedent to life, and what it must be in its incubation or ever it
_is_, it must be confessed that, unfortunately, everything in him was
purely personal. Isolated during his life by his egoism, that egoism is
now suicidal of his glory. On his tomb there is no proclaiming statue
to repeat to posterity the mysteries which genius seeks out at its own
cost.

But perhaps Desplein's genius was answerable for his beliefs, and for
that reason mortal. To him the terrestrial atmosphere was a generative
envelope; he saw the earth as an egg within its shell; and not being
able to determine whether the egg or the hen first was, he would
not recognize either the cock or the egg. He believed neither in the
antecedent animal nor the surviving spirit of man. Desplein had no
doubts; he was positive. His bold and unqualified atheism was like
that of many scientific men, the best men in the world, but invincible
atheists--atheists such as religious people declare to be impossible.
This opinion could scarcely exist otherwise in a man who was accustomed
from his youth to dissect the creature above all others--before, during,
and after life; to hunt through all his organs without ever finding the
individual soul, which is indispensable to religious theory. When he
detected a cerebral centre, a nervous centre, and a centre for aerating
the blood--the first two so perfectly complementary that in the latter
years of his life he came to a conviction that the sense of hearing is
not absolutely necessary for hearing, nor the sense of sight for
seeing, and that the solar plexus could supply their place without any
possibility of doubt--Desplein