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. In
those days a superior physician was supposed to be cultivating magic;
while curing his patient he was drawing their horoscopes. Princes
protected the men of genius who were willing to reveal the future;
they lodged them in their palaces and pensioned them. The famous
Cornelius Agrippa, who came to France to become the physician of Henri
II., would not consent, as Nostradamus did, to predict the future, and
for this reason he was dismissed by Catherine de' Medici, who replaced
him with Cosmo Ruggiero. The men of science, who were superior to
their times, were therefore seldom appreciated; they simply inspired
an ignorant fear of occult sciences and their results.

Without being precisely one of the famous mathematicians, the man whom