It is only priests, magistrates, and physicians who can hate in that way.
The official robe is terrible! But ideas are even more implacable than things.
Doctor Bouvard, one of Minoret's friends, believed in the new faith, and persevered to the day of his death in studying a science to which he sacrificed the peace of his life, for he was one of the chief "betes noires" of the Parisian faculty.

Minoret, a valiant supporter of the Encyclopedists, and a formidable adversary of Desion, Mesmer's assistant, whose pen had great weight in the controversy, quarreled with his old friend, and not only that, but he persecuted him.

His conduct to Bouvard must have caused him the only remorse which troubled the serenity of his declining years.

Since his retirement to Nemours the science of imponderable fluids (the only name suitable for magnetism, which, by the nature of its phenomena, is closely allied to light and electricity) had made immense progress, in spite of the ridicule of Parisian scientists.

Phrenology and physiognomy, the departments of Gall and Lavater (which are in fact twins, for one is to the other as cause is to effect), proved to the minds of more than one physiologist the existence of an intangible fluid which is the basis of the phenomena of the human will, and from which result passions, habits, the shape of faces and of skulls.