Science was making great strides.

Claes found that the progress of chemistry had been directed, unknown to chemists themselves, towards the object of his researches.

Learned men devoted to the higher sciences thought, as he did, that light, heat, electricity, galvanism, magnetism were all different effects of the same cause, and that the difference existing between substances hitherto considered simple must be produced by varying proportions of an unknown principle.

The fear that some other chemist might effect the reduction of metals and discover the constituent principle of electricity,--two achievements which would lead to the solution of the chemical Absolute,--increased what the people of Douai called a mania, and drove his desires to a paroxysm conceivable to those who devote themselves to the sciences, or who have ever known the tyranny of ideas.
Thus it happened that Balthazar was again carried away by a passion all the more violent because it had lain dormant so long.

Marguerite, who watched every evidence of her father's state of mind, opened the long-closed parlor.