Mesmerised by Michelle Shine

hour of seven tomorrow evening for all those interested in Samuel Hahnemann’s Homeopathy by the means of which I have been cured myself of tuberculosis, some twenty years ago.
     
    I nearly balled the leaflet in my fist and threw it away. ‘You’re an idiot, Gachet! You’ll end up end up a quack, dispensing herbs from Culpepper’s quackery, and cheating the world with homeopathy.’ I resolved to go to the meeting.
     
    It was a small chapel, a place for the newly grieved to kneel and say their prayers. By ten minutes before seven it was already twilight. Candles burned all around the altar. It had stopped raining hours ago but a cold wind rattled the windows and seeped in through a multitude of fissures in the structure. I sat in a pew in the middle of three rows and breathed heat through my hands. I was alone, wondering if anyone else would come, and was starting to question whether even Baron Clemens Maria Franz von Boenninghausen had changed his mind on such a miserable evening. Just then, a group of young men burst through the door. They were dandyish in tight fitting trousers, long collared shirts and frock coats. They were the same three students who had pursued me before. They sat next to and behind me. The scent of fermented hops was heady in the air.
    ‘It’s “I’m going to save the world Gachet ” come to listen to a talk on homeopathy,’ slurred Alain Desmarais, an arm resting on the back of the pew and a leg along the seat, his foot almost but not quite touching my thigh. ‘Yes, I bet you are interested in all this poxy stuff.’
    ‘We’ve come specially to keep you company,’ someone said from behind me . I could feel fingers digging into my shoulder through my jacket. The door squeaked on its hinges. I turned to see the man who handed me the leaflet, very tall, upright and elderly with a shock of white hair and bushy whiskers around his baldpate.
    ‘Good evening gentlemen,’ he said, walking down the aisle.
    He sat on the dais at the front, very casually, pulling up his trouser legs.
    ‘We are a very small gathering,’ he called out in a foreign accent. ‘I have prepared a speech but I would rather not read it out. Instead, I would like to speak to you honestly, man to man, off the cuff and from the heart. My subject tonight is homeopathy. And no, before you ask, I am not a medical doctor. Neither will I advertise myself as being one. What I am is a homeopathist, amongst other things. And you are all medical students?’
    Alain Desmarais laughed, and choked on his saliva.
    ‘I see, so first, let me tell you who I am and why I’m sitting before you tonight, for I am sure that you are all very sceptical indeed. I will start by telling you my story, so you can see that I have no need to set myself up as a charlatan.’
    ‘Oh, but you are!’ Alain Desmarais called out.
    The Baron continued.
    ‘I started my career, after graduating, as a Doctor of Civil and Criminal Law at the court of Louis Napoleon, King of Holland. I am also an agriculturalist. I formed the first agricultural society in the west of Germany, and have acted as President of the Provincial Court of Justice for the Westphalia district, evaluating land. But in 1827 I suffered from a serious derangement of health. I will not bore you with the symptoms, suffice to say that I had tuberculosis.
    ‘The allopaths worked on me for a whole year. I was tossed into cold baths and had leeches thrown at me to swell and drop off my skin as they sated of my blood. I was administered mercury and heroin. For a long while those medicines put me into a state where I would not have cared whether I lived or died, quite frankly. My dear wife tells me I was a nightmare to live with and no doubt at times, prayed for the latter. I was far from cured.
    ‘In the spring of 1829, I wrote to my good friend, Doctor Weihe, believing it to be my last correspondence. I had no idea he was a homeopath. I knew him as a botanist. He wrote back lecturing on