Old Father Malandin deemed the punishment excessively severe. A year of imprisonment for a cow that, when all was said and done, had recovered: framed in such terms, his business might still appear that of a useful man whose services had been grossly ill-requited. He had therefore lodged an appeal. Before the Royal Court of Rouen, on the 27th of January, 1832, he appeared to petition that the magistrates reconsider the price at which the lower court had valued his manner of relieving beasts and their owners alike.
The price he had claimed for himself was far less easy to quantify. He did not sell good health according to a posted tariff; he relied, so it was said, upon the open-handedness of those he succoured. Such an arrangement possesses subtleties entirely unknown to ordinary commerce: the client never knows precisely what is owed, and he who awaits payment may continue to posture as a benefactor. Approximately forty sous had passed from the farmhouse into the hands of the healer. Between that trifling sum and twelve months of solitary confinement lay an entire history of misplaced trust.
The Worth of a Cow
In the kitchen where we picture the farmer’s wife counting out her coin, the ailing beast occupied far more space than any person present. One might speak of the weather, of a chore yet undone, of a neighbour’s impending visit; yet the talk invariably drifted back to the cow, to what she had eaten, to the appearance of her milk, and to what must be done should she fail to rise from this languor. The sickness of an animal is never a matter of livestock alone when milk enters into the household accounts.
A coin was drawn from the small heap, then put back. The goodwife would have liked to know what sum might suffice to leave Malandin satisfied without betraying an ease of means she by no means possessed. Her companion offered little assistance. It is always easier to offer counsel upon money already spent by others than upon an expense waiting squarely before oneself, already laid out, with a man standing expectantly by the door. The healer had no need to show impatience. He held an advantage to which the farm’s masters were keenly sensitive: he appeared to know.
The Gazette describes him as a shepherd turned practitioner of the invisible powers. For his entire library, it attributes to him a little volume, the Grimoire of Pope Honorius, to which its columnist playfully assigns the most diverse virtues. Malandin thus offered far more than a mere remedy; behind his person stood an entire universe of explanations, wherein every mishap sprang from an active will, and where he who could discern that will had already traversed half the road toward a cure.
He had encountered the cow during one of his perambulations. His initial remark concerned the milk: that beast, he announced to the owners, could surely yield nothing good. Such words might seem unpromising to a husbandman whose herd thrives; addressed to folk already gripped by dread, they immediately assumed the air of a revelation. One ceased to ask the stranger his name. One merely wished to learn what must be done.
The journal goes so far as to contend that Malandin had himself administered a drug to the creature before presenting himself to offer assistance. It then describes milk that had turned an unnatural blue. This accusation, recorded without our having recourse to the actual trial depositions, casts a distinctly sinister pall over the visit: the calamity which the charlatan claimed to dispel would thus have been engineered by his own contrivance. Yet the owners, standing before him, saw only a man holding out the promise of deliverance. They were faced with an emergency; he possessed a ready answer.
The Count of Nine
The initial operation proved intricate. It required sprigs of boxwood, holy water, grains of wheat, salt, and virgin twine. Nine elements of each sort, according to the official report. The numeral recurred with an obstinacy that allowed everyone present to oversee at least some portion of the labour. A family utterly incapable of appraising the efficacy of a physic could at least assure themselves that their grains had been scrupulously counted.
About the cow, the constant scurrying provided anxious minds with occupation. One hurried to fetch what had just been demanded; another held the beast fast; a third recollected some forgotten utensil. In our domestic scene, the farmer’s wife paused a moment in her haste to watch Malandin pace backward around the animal. She had dreaded her own helplessness; she was now witness to an act. Such a difference is often enough to render an agonising vigil bearable.
The operation then moved into the dwelling. Cream was set upon the fire to boil; a table fork was plunged into it, withdrawn, and plunged in once more. Every gesture assumed the solemnity conferred by the hush of the onlookers. The visitor concluded his business, made ready to depart, and left behind him the utensils to be washed and put away, together with a new obligation: awaiting the fruits of a labour to which they had just actively contributed. Once one has lent a hand to the compounding of a cure, one desires its success all the more fervently.
It did not succeed. At the very least, the cow remained uncured when Malandin reappeared some days later. A common man might have dreaded such a return; the journal’s account, however, credits him with an explanation already forged. He claimed to have seen in a dream a wayfarer with one foot shod and the other bare. This discordance, in the grammar of his divinations, had forewarned him that the cure had failed to take hold.
Thus failure itself was transmuted into fresh evidence of his occult science. The owners had no need to inform him of what they had endured; he knew it before they did, through channels forever closed to them. Their disappointment could no longer be urged against him as an objection. He had claimed it as his own, and already it served him as the pretext for a second intervention.
The Forgotten Physic
This time, he demanded incense, a consecrated taper, and a crucifix. The ceremonial resumed, still more heavily freighted with mystery. The official account mingles these rites with measures belonging to physical husbandry: a recommended blood-letting, followed by draughts of boiled starch. The Gazette attributes the creature’s recovery entirely to these latter drenchings. Such was its editorial explanation; the chronicle is neither a formal veterinary post-mortem nor an exhaustive log of the treatments the cow underwent.
To the farm folk, the alteration was plain to see. The beast was mending. It remained only to reward the man who had stepped forward when all other counsel had failed. The coins left the table, and Malandin was able to take his leave with that confirmation which a satisfied patron so readily bestows upon one whose expertise he imagines he has tested. Should a neighbour now stop to ask what had transpired, they had a wondrous tale to relate.
The fame of the cure spread abroad until it reached the ears of the King’s Prosecutor at Le Havre. This very triumph proved the undoing of the itinerant healer. In the barnyard, folk spoke of a beast restored to her keepers; before the bench of justice, the court was compelled to scrutinise how the money had been obtained. The selfsame ceremonies that had awed their spectators now stood revealed as the machinations of a swindle. The eventual recovery could no longer serve to vindicate all that had gone before.
A sentence of one year’s imprisonment was handed down. Malandin petitioned for an appeal; the court affirmed the judgment. The brief notice in the Gazette leaves us at this ruling, neither conducting us to his eventual release nor revealing what became of the wizard’s book. His trade, for the present, had encountered a barrier that no further incantation could set back.
At the farmstead we have pictured, life nevertheless resumed around the recovered animal. The goodwife put away the crock she had used for the boiled cream. Henceforth she had to reconcile two recollections that sat ill together: the very tangible relief of having saved her cow, and the galling thought of having paid a scoundrel convicted of having cozened her. She might join her neighbours in mocking the follies recounted in the courtroom. Yet alone before her diminished coins, she knew that stark terror had tipped the scale, and that those who had stood to lose nothing had sat in judgment upon her far too lightly.