The Atheists Mass

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The Atheist's Mass

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Title: The Atheist's Mass
Author: Honore de Balzac
Translator: Clara Bell
Release Date: December 3, 2005 [EBook #1220]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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ATHEIST'S MASS ***

Produced by Dagny and Bonnie

THE ATHEIST'S MASS

BY
HONORE DE BALZAC

Translated by Clara Bell

This is dedicated to Auguste Borget by his friend De Balzac

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