To this Dr. Fornerol made no reply. He was not remarkably given to contradicting the opinions of rich patients. But M. Bergeret, professor of literature at the University, bent his head towards his left shoulder and gave a far-away look, as he always did whenever he was going to speak. Then he said:
“Gentlemen, it is a fact that these marks, called ‘wishing-spots,’ reduce themselves to a small number of types, which may be classified, according to their colour and form, into strawberries, currants, and raspberries, or wine and coffee spots. It would, perhaps, be convenient to add to these types that of those diffused yellow spots in which folks endeavour to recognise portions of tart or mince-pie. Now, who can possibly believe that pregnant women desire nothing save to drink wine or _café au lait_, or to eat red fruits, and, possibly, forcemeat-pie? Such an idea runs counter to natural philosophy. That desire which, according to certain philosophers, has alone created the world and alone preserves it, works in them as in all living beings, only with more range and diversity. It gives them secret fevers, hidden passions, and strange frenzies. Without going into the question of the effect of their particular condition on the appetites common to all that lives, and even to plants, we recognise that this condition does not produce indifference, but that it rather perverts and inflames the deeper instincts. If the new-born child ought really to carry the visible signs of its mother’s desires, believe me, we should more frequently see imprinted on its body other symbols than these innocent strawberries and drops of coffee with which the folly of old wives diverts itself.”
“I see what you mean,” said M. de Terremondre. “Women loving jewels, many children would be born with sapphires, rubies, and emeralds on their fingers, and with gold bracelets on their wrists; necklaces of pearls, rivières of diamonds would cover their neck and breast. Still, one ought to be able to point to such children as these.”
And, taking up from the table, where M. de Terremondre had left it, the thirty-eighth volume of _l’Histoire Générale des Voyages_, the professor buried his nose in the book, between pages 212 and 213, a spot which, every time that he had opened the inevitable old book during the last six years, had confronted him like a fate, to the exclusion of every other page, as an instance of the monotony with which life glides by, a symbol of the uniformity of those tasks and those days in a provincial university which precede the day of death and the travail of the body in the tomb. And this time, as he had already done so many times before, M. Bergeret read in volume xxxviii. of _l’Histoire Générale des Voyages_ the first lines of page 212: “a passage to the North. ‘It is to this check,’ said he, ‘that we owe the opportunity of being able to visit the Sandwich Isles again, and to enrich our voyage with a discovery which, although the last, seems in many respects to be the most important that Europeans have yet made in the whole expanse of the Pacific Ocean.’ The happy prophecy which these words seemed to denote has, unfortunately, never been fulfilled.”