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 transientgenius. 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, thus finding two souls in man, confirmed his

atheism by this fact, though it is no evidence against God. This
man died, it is said, in final impenitence, as do, unfortunately,

many noble geniuses, whom God may forgive.
The life of this man, great as he was, was marred by many

meannesses, to use the expression employed by his enemies, who
were anxious to diminish his glory, but which it would be more

proper to call apparent contradictions. Envious people and fools,
having no knowledge of the determinations by which superior

spirits are moved, seize at once on superficial inconsistencies,
to formulate an accusation and so to pass sentence on them. If,

subsequently, the proceedings thus attacked are crowned with
success, showing the correlations of the preliminaries and the

results, a few of the vanguard of calumnies always survive. In
our day, for instance, Napoleon was condemned by our

contemporaries when he spread his eagle's wings to alight in
England: only 1822 could explain 1804 and the flatboats at

Boulogne.
As, in Desplein, his glory and science were invulnerable, his

enemies attacked his odd moods and his temper, whereas, in fact,
he was simply characterized by what the English call

eccentricity. Sometimes very handsomely dressed, like Crebillon
the tragical, he would suddenly affectextremeindifference as to

what he wore; he was sometimes seen in a carriage, and sometimes
on foot. By turns rough and kind, harsh and covetous on the

surface, but capable of offering his whole fortune to his exiled
masters--who did him the honor of accepting it for a few days--no

man ever gave rise to such contradictory judgements. Although to
obtain a black ribbon, which physicians ought not to intrigue

for, he was capable of dropping a prayer-book out of his pocket
at Court, in his heart he mocked at everything; he had a deep

contempt for men, after studying them from above and below, after
detecting their genuine expression when performing the most

solemn and the meanest acts of their lives.
The qualities of a great man are often federative. If among these

colossal spirits one has more talent than wit, his wit is still
superior to that of a man of whom it is simply stated that "he is

witty." Genius always presupposes moral insight. This insight may
be applied to a special subject; but he who can see a flower must

be able to see the sun. The man who on hearing a diplomate he has
saved ask, "How is the Emperor?" could say, "The courtier is

alive; the man will follow!"--that man is not merely a surgeon or
a physician, he is prodigiously witty also. Hence a patient and

diligent student of human nature will admit Desplein's exorbitant
pretensions, and believe--as he himself believed--that he might

have been no less great as a minister than he was as a surgeon.
Among the riddles which Desplein's life presents to many of his

contemporaries, we have chosen one of the most interesting,
because the answer is to be found at the end of the narrative,

and will avenge him for some foolish charges.
Of all the students in Desplein's hospital, Horace Bianchon was

one of those to whom he most warmly attached himself. Before
being a house surgeon at the Hotel-Dieu, Horace Bianchon had been

a medical student lodging in a squalid boarding house in the
Quartier Latin, known as the Maison Vauquer. This poor young man

had felt there the gnawing of that burning poverty which is a
sort of crucible from which great talents are to emerge as pure

and incorruptible as diamonds, which may be subjected to any
shock without being crushed. In the fierce fire of their

unbridled passions they acquire the most impeccable honesty, and
get into the habit of fighting the battles which await genius

with the constant work by which they coerce their cheated
appetites.

Horace was an upright young fellow, incapable of tergiversation
on a matter of honor, going to the point without waste of words,

and as ready to pledge his cloak for a friend as to give him his
time and his night hours. Horace, in short, was one of those