Explore "Magnetism" by Guy de Maupassant on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The dinner was ended and the bachelors were sitting over their cigars and liqueurs, feeling comfortably quiescent as a result of good food and drink, when someone started a discussion of magnetism: Donato's tricks and Charcot's experiments. These sceptical, easygoing men who cared nothing about religion, unexpectedly began to tell stories of strange happenings, incredible things that nevertheless had really occurred, so they said; suddenly converted to the mysteries of magnetism which they supported in the name of science, they fell back into superstitious beliefs clinging like a burr to this last remnant of magic.
One of the party -- a man full of vigour, a follower of young girls and hunter of women -- smiled in his convinced incredulity: as he did not believe in anything, all discussion seemed to him to be futile.