Mesmerised by Michelle Shine Page A

hygiene and asked me of my symptoms. As he was interested, I drew him a lengthy account of my suffering. He sent me back a small vial of pillules that contained a highly dilute form of the windflower pulsatilla. I took my friend’s medicine twice daily and by the end of the summer I proclaimed myself cured.’
    Alain began to clap slowly. ‘Quack, quack.’
    ‘Tell me, Monsieur, why are you so angry that this anecdote happens to be the truth? Do you really think I would have come here to talk to four students instead of eating a hot dinner and drinking fine wine at my son’s home, if it was not so? I am not peddling snake poison in the city square, for God’s sake!’
    Alain Desmarais stood, aimed his arm backwards and threw a tomato as if he was bowling a cricket ball. The orb splattered in the space between Baron von Boeninghausen’s eyebrows. His friends laughed and catcalled. The Baron rose to an imposing figure. ‘I think you’d better leave,’ he said.
    ‘Deluded old fool,’ came a voice from behind me.
    ‘Come on, let’s go. This is boring,’ said Alain Desmarais.
    Pushing and shoving at each other, the gang departed.
    I stayed in my seat. He shook a red satin handkerchief out of the top pocket of his greatcoat and wiped his forehead. I watched as the fruit juice seeped and darkened the fabric as if from blood.
    ‘We are alone,’ the Baron called.
    ‘I think so.’
    ‘And you are, Monsieur?’
    ‘I am Paul Ferdinand Gachet of Lille.’
    ‘I’ve seen you somewhere, recently. Where have I seen you?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘Come, think man; I’ve just been attacked by hoodlums!’
    ‘Maybe down by the water, on the banks of the Seine. If I have time, I go there to paint en plein air .’
    ‘If you are an artist, why are you here tonight? The subject I intended to focus on is very much a science.’
    ‘I am also a medical student, and with respect Monsieur, Leonardo Da Vinci was both an artist and a scientist.’
    ‘Are you interested in homeopathy or have you also come to wear me down?’
    ‘I am interested in a gentler medicine that works. I know nothing about homeopathy.’
    ‘Its practise requires an endurance of flying tomatoes.’
    ‘I would like to learn how to do it.’
    ‘Homeopathy is not something you do. A homeopathist is something you become. Here … ,’ he said, waving a book with a brown suede cover in the air. ‘ … The Organon of Medicine by Samuel Hahnemann , I suggest you read it. You will be doing me a favour if you take it. Please,’ Clemens thrust the book forwards as he walked towards me.
    I did not turn my head to watch him leave. But I heard the hollow sound of his leather heels on the stone floor, and the protest of an opening door. I lowered my gaze from a wooden cross bearing a suffering, roughly painted china Jesus, to the book. Slowly, I opened the front cover and stared at Clemens’s elaborate calligraphy, noticing his home address in Prussia, and further down in print, that the volume was first published in 1810.
    I stretched out my legs underneath the pew in front and read until the gas lamps on the floor had stopped whistling and the majority of candles on the altar had spluttered their last hint of light.

 
     
     
     
    P hosphorus Three
    May 5th
     
    ‘ The truth is in nature, and I shall prove it.’
    Paul Ceza nne
     
    Monsieur Armand doesn’t answer. I knock again on his door. Eventually, Madame Armand lets me in. She wears a grey serge dress and a white starched apron. She has a linen kerchief pinned in her hair. She waddles. But despite the simplicity in her looks there is wonder in her grey eyes.
    ‘You’re always so positive. How do you do it?’ I onc e asked her over a cup of home-grown chamomile tea.
    ‘Growing things,’ she said. ‘ They have a passion for me.’
    ‘And you for them.’
    ‘And me for them,’ she agreed, lifting her cup in a toast.
    ‘Ah Madame Armand, I was just wondering … Monsieur Armand, is he