A calculation session at the dentist's
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According to Christophe, author of the side-splitting work l'Idée fixe du savant Cosinus (The Obsession of the Scholar Cosinus), Cosinus — alias Pancrace Eusèbe Zéphyrin Brioché — was a graduate of the École Polytechnique, the best in the world. "Every École is the best in the world for those who graduated from it" noted the author of the book, himself a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure. Zéphyrin was a mathematics teacher at the École des Tabacs et Télégraphes, and notoriously absent-minded: during his lectures, he would mistake his handkerchief for his blackboard duster… "And conversely", adds the author, a lover of mathematical pleonasm.
Christophe's hero wakes up one day with a shooting pain in the right side of his lower jaw and makes an appointment with the dentist Max Hilaire. In the waiting room, Cosinus meets Madame Belazor, who is about to have a root extracted, and our mathematician, forgetting that he is at the dentist's, believes himself to be at home and offers to treat the lady by extracting the root with logarithm tables. Things will end badly for the dentist: after Madame Belazor flees and declares that Max Hilaire is mad, the police come to arrest him and lock him away in an asylum. Our poor dentist, put in a straitjacket, genuinely goes insane, and sets about treating the Dent du Midi, using the Plomb du Cantal for the filling…
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