“I regret,” said André Marcueil in the slightly mocking, expectant silence that ensued, “I regret that I am unable, without falsification, to have my convictions conform to worldly opinions and to science. Scientists, as you have just heard, are of a mind with those savages in the heart of Africa who, in order to express any number greater than five – whether it be six or a thousand – wave their ten fingers in the air and say: ‘Many, many.’ But I really believe that

‘that’s just a game,’

not only to wed the thirty or fifty virgin daughters of King Lysius, but to beat the record set by that Indian ‘so celebrated by Theophrastus, Pliny and Athenaeus’ who, Rabelais reports after these authors, ‘with the aid of a certaine Herb, did it in one Day three-score Times and ten, and More.’ ”

“He scored three times in ten?” joked the general, an inveterate punster.

“ ‘Septuageno coitu durasse libidinem contactu herbae cujusdam,’ ” quoted Bathybius, wishing to interrupt him. “I think the phrase is from Pliny, after Theophrastus.”

“The author of the Characters?” asked Saint-Jurieu.

“Oh no!” said the doctor. “The author of the History of Plants and the Causes of Plants.”

“Theophrastus of Eresus,” said Marcueil, “in the twentieth chapter of Book IX of his History of Plants.”

“With the aid of a certain herb?” reflected Elson, the chemist.

“ ‘Herbae cujusdam,’” pontificated Bathybius, “ ‘cujus nomen genusque non posuit.’ But Pliny, in Book III, Chapter XXVIII, infers that it must be the marrowy substance in the branches of the tithymallum.”

“That tells us a lot,” said Mrs. Gough. “It’s even more obscure than saying ‘a certain herb.’ ”

“It’s pleasanter to believe,” said Marcueil, “that the ‘certain herb’ was added by some timorous copyist to cushion the reader’s mind against what he judged too rude a shock.”

“With or without the herb. . . in one day? I mean, just one day out of a man’s life?” inquired Madame de Saint-Jurieu.

“What can be done on one day can, with all the more reason, be done every day,” said Marcueil. “One grows accustomed. . . But if this man was very exceptional, it is indeed possible that he succeeded in confining it within the space of one day.. . . We may also suppose that he occupied his time in a like manner every day, and that he admitted spectators only once.”

“An Indian?” mused Henriette Cyne. “A red man with a tomahawk and scalps, like in Fenimore Cooper?”

“No, my child,” said Marcueil. “What we today call a Hindu. But the country is unimportant. I agree with you, Rabelais’s phrase rings majestic: ‘That Indian so celebrated by Theophrastus,’ and it’s a shame that he wasn’t a real Indian, a Delaware or a Huron, so as to create your imaginary scene.”

“A Hindu?” said the doctor. “True, if it were not so flagrantly incredible. . . India is the land of aphrodisiacs.”