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Updated: May 12, 2025
"I possess no cow, sire, nor have I ever had one." The King was beside himself, and flew at Coctier's throat. "You have lied to me, scoundrel; it is not medicine you were preparing, but poison." The gardener disappeared. "If I wished to do what I should," said Coctier, "I would treat you like Charles the Bold did when you cheated him." "What did he do? What do people say that he did?"
In the year 1483, the same year in which Luther was born, Docter Coctier sat in his laboratory at Paris, and carried on a philosophical discussion with a chemical expert who was passing through the city. The laboratory was in the same building as his observatory, in the Marais quarter of the town, a site occupied to-day by the Place des Vosges.
The expert, whose name was Balthasar, now first noticed that he had given his information without obtaining a receipt or any equivalent for it, and, since he was not one of the unselfish kind, he threw out a feeler. "How is our gracious King?" The question revealed his secret and his wish, and put Doctor Coctier on his guard.
The expert noticed a cruel smile on the Doctor's face, and, feeling himself in danger, tried to spring up, but the arms of the chair had closed around him, and he was held fast. The next moment Doctor Coctier seemed to be seeking for something in the sand with his left foot, and, when he had found it, he pressed with all his weight on the invisible object.
"Now the rod is thrown into the fire," said Doctor Coctier, "let it burn; the children have grown up, and can look after themselves. Executioners also have their uses, as Tristan L'Ermite and his master Louis XI know. Peace be with them." Cardinal Wolsey's oared galley pushed off from the Tower Bridge, below the iron gateway.
Artistically contrived and impenetrable, the labyrinth meandered in every direction. It seemed to be endlessly long, and was so arranged that its perspectives deceived the eye. It also contained secret doors and underground passages, and a visitor soon grew aware that it had not been constructed as a joke, but in deadly earnest. Only the King and Doctor Coctier possessed the key to this puzzle.
"Farewell, young man," he said; "loquacious, conceited young man, who wanted to lord it over Doctor Coctier. Now I will settle the King for you." The seat disappeared in the earth with the expert. It was an oubliette a pit with a trap-door, which drew the veil of oblivion over the man who had vanished.
"Better leave it alone!" answered the Doctor cynically; "you know what the starshave said eight days after my death, follows yours." The King had an attack of cramp, for he believed this fable, which Coctier had invented to protect his own life. But when he recovered consciousness, he continued to wander in his talk. "They also say that I murdered my father, but that is a lie.
Not far away is the Bastille, the magnificent Hotel de Saint-Pol, and the brilliant Des Tournelles, the residence of the Kings before the Louvre was built. Here Louis XI had given his private physician, chancellor, and doctor of all the sciences, Coctier, a house which lay in a labyrinth-like park called the Garden of Daedalus.
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