e of their cruel
charmers, and paying them back scorn for scorn. Governments will give
up the unnatural and barbarous custom of guillotining dangerous people.
They will no longer shut them up in cramped cells at Mazas to complete
their brutishness; they will not send them to the Toulon school to
finish their criminal education; they will merely dry them up in
batches--one for ten years, another for forty, according to the gravity
of their deserts. A simple store-house will replace the prisons, police
lock-ups and jails. There will be no more escapes to fear, no more
prisoners to feed. An enormous quantity of dried beans and mouldy
potatoes will be saved for the consumption of the country.

"You have, ladies, a feeble delineation of the benefits which Doctor
Meiser hoped to pour upon Europe by introducing the desiccation of man.
He made his great experiment in 1813 on a French colonel--a prisoner, I
have been told, and condemned as a spy by court-martial. Unhappily he
did not succeed; for I bought the colonel and his box for the price of
an ordinary cavalry horse, in the dirtiest shop in Berlin."

CHAPTER IV.

THE VICTIM.

"My dear Leon," said M. Renault, "you remind me of a college
commencement. We have listened to your dissertation just as they listen
to the Latin discourse of the professor of rhetoric; there are always in
the audience a majority which learns nothing from it, and a minority
which understands nothing of it. But every body listens patiently, on
account of the sensations which are to come by and by. M. Martout and I
are acquainted with Meiser's works, and those of his distinguished
pupil, M. Pouchet; you have, then, said too much that is in them, if you
intended to speak for our benefit; and you have not said enough that is
in them for these ladies and gentlemen who know nothing of the existing
discussions regarding the vital and organic principles.

"Is life a principle of action which animates the organs and puts them
into play? Is it not, on the contrary, merely the result of
organization--the play of various functions of organized matter? This is
a problem of the highest importance, which would interest the ladies
themselves, if one were to place it plainly before them. It would be
sufficient to say: 'We inquire whether there is a vital principle--the
source of all functions of the body, or if life be not merely the result
of the regular play of the organs? The vital principle, in the eye