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be born, and destroy death?” Dumas had already employed the same idea
in
Joseph Balsamo: Mémoires d'un médicin
(1846-48),
39
his version of
the life of the famous eighteenth-century Sicilian 'alchemist' and imp-
ostor Cagliostro (1743-95), pseudonymous 'autobiographies' of whom
were very popular at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Here it is
Cagliostro's alchemical master Althotas who, in chapter 60 entitled “The
Elixir of Life”, in a dialogue with Cagliostro about contemporary mate-
rialist philosophers, says: “Some jokers are debating about the existence
or non-existence of god instead of trying, like me, to become God
himself.” His way of trying is, of course, the mixing of an elixir of life.
Because the final ingredient is still missing, the aged alchemist orders his
pupil to bring him this crucial material into his hidden laboratory.
According to Dumas's bizarre fantasy, the successful elixir requires the
last three drops of a child's arterial blood, for which, of course, the child
must be killed. Since Dumas considered the hubris theme alone not
convincing, he felt obliged to add some moral perversion to his main
characters. This essential lack of moral argument for the hubris theme is,
I suggest, the common origin of the 'mad scientist', of which Dumas was
by no means the inventor, in the literature.
Balzac had already applied the same combination of hubris, moral
perversion, and bizarreness in his already quoted
L'Elixir de longue vie
(1830). Here, Don Juan, greedy to inherit the wealth of his dying father,
hypocritically says to him “we must submit to the will of God”, where-
upon the father, in possession of the elixir, responds, “I am God!” When
it is Don Juan's turn to die or to 'play God', through an accident the
elixir revives only his head. Balzac finished his grotesque story with a
bizarre scene inside a church: the head of Don Juan, while shouting blas-
phemies, removes itself from the dead body, gets a firm hold with its
teeth on the head of a priest, and kills the priest, crying “Idiot, tell us now
if there is a God!” Compared to his usual narrative style, with his meticu-
lously detailed descriptions of characters and environments, this is per-
haps the weirdest scene of Balzac's complete oeuvre.
The need to add further plausibility to the hubris theme inspired the
imagination of writers more than anything else. We should recall that the
39
First published Paris: Cadot, 1846-48.