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Updated: May 25, 2025
Thus he was compelled to moderate his desires, and he rarely touched these fearful elixirs, in the same way that he could no longer with impunity visit his red corridor and grow ecstatic at the sight of the gloomy Odilon Redon prints and the Jan Luyken horrors. And yet, when he felt inclined to read, all literature seemed to him dull after these terrible American imported philtres.
In the midst of all this enjoyment of empire he never once violated that respectful awe with which the usher had found means to inspire him; but he by no means preserved the same regard for the principal master, an old illiterate German quack, who had formerly practised corn-cutting among the quality, and sold cosmetic washes to the ladies, together with teeth-powders, hair-dyeing liquors, prolific elixirs, and tinctures to sweeten the breath.
He used to say, "I have two skins; this is the real one," pointing to the bearskin. The little house on wheels belonged to himself and to the wolf. Besides his house, his retort, and his wolf, he had a flute and a violoncello on which he played prettily. He concocted his own elixirs. His wits yielded him enough to sup on sometimes.
Is there nothing for New York analogous to rolling on the floor, to the straight-front corset, to the sugarless, starchless diet? Come, you must not deny us all hope! How did Boston manage to remain so small? What elixirs, what exercises, did she take or use? Surely she did not do it all by reading and thinking!"
These various instructions, not being properly arranged, tended to impede each other, and she did not acquire that degree of improvement her natural good sense was capable of receiving; she knew something of philosophy and physic, but not enough to eradicate the fondness she had imbibed from her father for empiricism and alchemy; she made elixirs, tinctures, balsams, pretended to secrets, and prepared magestry; while quacks and pretenders, profiting by her weakness, destroyed her property among furnaces, drugs and minerals, diminishing those charms and accomplishments which might have been the delight of the most elegant circles.
A captivating talker; solid for religion, for the rights of Germany against intrusive French and others: such insight, orthodoxy, sense and ingenuity; pleasant to hear; and all with the due quantity of oil, though he "both snuffles and lisps;" and has privately, in case of need, a capacity of lying, for he curiously distils you any lie, in his religious alembics, till it become tolerable to his conscience, or even palatable, as elixirs are; capacity of double-distilled lying probably the greatest of his day.
He was a quack dentist on his rounds, who was offering to the public full sets of teeth, opiates, powders and elixirs. Fantine mingled in the group, and began to laugh with the rest at the harangue, which contained slang for the populace and jargon for respectable people.
Every drug that had been reserved from the laboratory of the late Court apothecary was brought, mixed with the elixir and fused; and he tried each new mixture on himself, for Frau Schimmel was not to be persuaded to smell any more elixirs.
These pretended philosophers invariably disappeared after the first or second experiment, or their powders or elixirs have failed to produce their effect, either because attention being excited they have found no opportunity to renew the trick without being discovered, or because they have not had sufficient gold dust for more than one trial.
Among other things that he had undertaken was one, and not the least fastidious, which consisted in giving, by correspondence, advice to the subscribers of a fashion magazine, or, more exactly speaking, to recommend, in the form of medical advice, all the cosmetics, depilatories, elixirs, dyes, essences, oils, creams, soaps, pomades, toothpowders, rouges, and also all the chemists' specialties, to which their inventors wished to give an authority that the public, which believes itself acute, refused to the simple advertisement on the last page.
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