In the middle of the room the countess beheld a short, stout man, apparently out of breath and stupefied, whose eyes were blindfolded and his features so distorted with terror that it was impossible to guess at their natural expression.
"God's death! you scamp," said the count, giving him back his eyesight by a rough movement which threw upon the man's neck the bandage that had been upon his eyes.

"I warn you not to look at anything but the wretched woman on whom you are now to exercise your skill; if you do, I'll fling you into the river that flows beneath those windows, with a collar round your neck weighing a hundred pounds!" With that, he pulled down upon the breast of his stupefied hearer the cravat with which his eyes had been bandaged.
"Examine first if this can be a miscarriage," he continued; "in which case your life will answer to me for the mother's; but, if the child is living, you are to bring it to me." So saying, the count seized the poor operator by the body and placed him before the countess, then he went himself to the depths of a bay-window and began to drum with his fingers upon the panes, casting glances alternately on his serving-man, on the bed, and at the ocean, as if he were pledging to the expected child a cradle in the waves.
The man whom, with outrageous violence, the count and Bertrand had snatched from his bed and fastened to the crupper of the latter's horse, was a personage whose individuality may serve to characterize the period,--a man, moreover, whose influence was destined to make itself felt in the house of Herouville.
Never in any age were the nobles so little informed as to natural science, and never was judicial astrology held in greater honor; for at no period in history was there a greater general desire to know the future.

This ignorance and this curiosity had led to the utmost confusion in human knowledge; all things were still mere personal experience; the nomenclatures of theory did not exist; printing was done at enormous cost; scientific communication had little or no facility; the Church persecuted science and all research which was based on the analysis of natural phenomena.

Persecution begat mystery.

So, to the people as well as to the nobles, physician and alchemist, mathematician and astronomer, astrologer and necromancer were six attributes, all meeting in the single person of the physician.