Singular Amours

by Edmond Thiaudière

  “Alas! I’m afraid that she has none and that she yields too quickly to certain attacks.”

  “We’ll give her that instinct. That’s another bump to produce, number four. Is she frank?”

  “That’s what I’ve never known. She might well be dissimulating, hypocritical and deceptive.”

  “Marvelous! I’ll seek out the bump labeled number six by Gall, and if I encounter it, I’ll efface it completely. Is she docile?”

  “Not very.”

  “Then we’ll attenuate bump number twenty-seven slightly: firmness, perseverance and stubbornness.”

  “I’ll be very obliged to you, Mr. Bread…but above all, don’t alert the person in question, for she’s capable of not wanting to have her faults corrected.”

  “Don’t worry. You have nothing else for which to reproach her?”

  “She does have one mania that is presently leading me to despair, because my resources can’t keep up with it…a mania for traveling, but what can you do about that?”

  “I can do a great deal,” Mr. Bread replied, “And I assure you that I can take it away by flattening bump number twelve, that of voyages.”6

  “Decidedly, Mr. Bread,” I exclaimed, “You’re an admirable man, and you deserve to have your praises sung in the five continents of the world; in the meantime, they’ll be sung by me, I promise you, in the capital of the world’s five continents.”

  “I beg you not to do anything of the sort,” Mr. Bread said to me; I’m afraid that my clientele might be augmented enormously, for there are few people who, like you, would prefer to remain as nature has made them, when they have the opportunity to be more beautiful.”

  “And what are your prices?” I asked him. “How much do you charge to transform your man or your woman?”

  “It’s according to the sex, the subject and the subject’s fortune. For a man I charge double what I charge for a woman, because the work is less attractive; and if the subject is very deformed, naturally, my difficulty being greater, my salary must also be greater; finally, I try to apply the principle of the gospel that the breath of the wind should be proportionate to the fleece of the ewe, and my prices always vary from that point of view, between twenty thousand francs and a hundred francs. I’ve already earned veritable wealth from my métier as a corrector of Nature in America and England, but as I have no children, as I have a horror of luxury and as I am, thank God, endowed with sufficient good sense not to find any pleasure in hoarding money, I haven’t kept that wealth. And I don’t repent of the manner in which I’ve employed it. With the money that some give me in order to become beautiful, I render others happy.”

  With that, I took my leave of Mr. Bread respectfully, fixing with him the following Thursday for the reconstruction of Rosa’s skull.

  “Until Thursday, then.”

  “Until Thursday, Mr. Bread.”

  And then I woke up.

  DOCTOR MELANSKI

  I

  About five years ago, one day in July—I no longer remember which—near the bandstand in the Tuileries, at about half past five, I met one of my old schoolmates, named Mauplaisant, who insisted on taking me to dinner at the Brasserie Andier.

  Celebrity is always so relative and so limited that for half a league around the Rue Hautefeuille perhaps no one, except for a few artists, suspects the existence of that establishment. And yet, it is illustrious for its Alsatian cuisine and its clientele of young men, great beer-drinkers but also remarkable under other titles, and the paternal amenity of its chef, Monsieur Andier.

  As he opened the door of the Brasserie, Mauplaisant said to me: “I’m going to introduce you to a fellow who will please you, I’m sure of it. He’s melancholy, like you; you can commiserate over the poverties of human nature and proclaim happiness impossible.”

  He was talking as we advanced into the brasserie, with the consequence that the man to whom he wanted to introduce me, who was at the far end of the room with his elbows on a table, his eyes watchful and a cigarette in his hand, only hearing the word “impossible,” said to him: “What’s impossible, Mauplaisant?”

  “It’s impossible,” Mauplaisant replied, “that you won’t become the friend of this eccentric here.” To me, he added: “I introduce to you Monsieur Gabriel Melanski, the son of a Polish refugee, student in medicine, and one of the best souls I know in the black variety.”

  With that I held out my hand to Monsieur Melanski, who welcomed with a visible good grace that spontaneous gesture on my part, while Mauplaisant tried to describe humorously what kind of man I am.

  Certainly, nothing external advertised any possible resemblance between the character of Monsieur Melanski and mine, for at first sight we were as different as can be: he was very neatly clad, his physiognomy was cold and bronzed, his attitude very proud; I was dressed a trifle carelessly, my gaze is blue and lukewarm, my manners tender. Fundamentally, though, Mauplaisant was not mistaken in introducing us to one another as future friends; and I even think that the intimacy that issued from that almost fortuitous introduction at the Brasserie Andier far exceeded his expectations.

  After a conversation in charcoal that lasted a good two hours and was a kind of portrait of our meager terrestrial destiny, I was Melanski’s friend and Melanski was my friend, to a closer degree than Mauplaisant was himself. That is because intellectual camaraderie always prevails over the frivolous camaraderie of past times.

  After that, we saw one another frequently and, like two old invalids discussing Waterloo and commiserating with one another reciprocally and the leg that they left there, we talked about our disastrous campaign through society, but we complained far less about what we had suffered than what still remained to us to suffer. Meanwhile, we did not yield to the illusion so common among veterans that consists of pretending that if it had depended on us, the battle would have been won. We believed, on the contrary, that we would have been the first to compromise the success of the human combat against evil by virtue of our blunders or our weakness, and that was what enraged us the most.

  All of our self-esteem, by virtue of a singular reversal of vulgar self-esteem, was in seeking mutually what we called our “little serpents”—which is to say, the shameful, paltry or ridiculous underlying motives of our actions, instead of allowing us to lend them titular motives that appear so honorable, generous and noble.

  Each of us became the second conscience of the other. Our two prides only any longer formed one, and they shared the benefits of our respective observations. Understandably, at that point, amity is all the more solid because it is founded on a species of egotism.

  I have only wanted to indicate to the reader what the basis was of my liaison with Melanski; I shall not go on.

  Three days before he sustained his thesis at the Faculté de Médecine I was obliged to go precipitately to Poitou for family affairs. I stayed there much longer than I had anticipated. Melanski had promised to write to me, but he did not, and I, piqued by seeing him so negligent, or perhaps by virtue of a negligence equal to his, I did not write to him either.

  When I returned to Paris six months later and I went to ask for him at the place where I knew he lived, the concierge said to me: “Monsieur Melanski? He left Paris a long time ago, Monsieur.”

  “Impossible! Where is he, then?”

  “He’s a physician in Montivilliers.”

  “And where is this Montivilliers?”

  “Here,” the concierge said. “This is his exact address.” Then he showed me a little strip of paper on which Melanski had written in his own hand: Monsieur Gabriel Melanski, doctor in medicine at Montivilliers (Seine-Inférieure).

  “Why on earth has he gone to bury himself out there?” I exclaimed. “He always expressed to me the firmest intention of staying in Paris. And how is it that he didn’t inform me?”

  Under the impression of a great surprise, I went to see Mauplaisant, and for fear that he might imagine—which was, in fact, true—that I had come less to see him than to see
k information about Melanski, I pretended to be unaware of the latter’s departure.

  “And our friend Melanski,” I said to him, “how is he? Is it a long time since you’ve seen him?”

  “I perceive,” said Mauplaisant, “that Melanski has acted no better in your regard than in mine.”

  “Bah! What has he done, then?”

  “He’s quite Paris definitively, without informing us, without bidding us farewell. He’s an odd fellow. One can be unsociable, but frankly, that’s no reason to act in that fashion. You, for example...”

  “Oh, me! Let’s not say anything about me. I’m no better than Melanski, I assure you. Melanski is full of heart. You’ve told me so yourself twenty times over, but he’s rendered strange, odd and capricious by his hypochondria.”

  “You make me laugh, all of you, with your hypochondria,” exclaimed Mauplaisant. “There’s no hypochondria involved. I ask you what we’ve done to deserve that Melanski...”

  “In sum, where is he?” I interrupted.

  Mauplaisant repeated what I had already found out.

  “And how do you know his address?”

  “Oh like this: I had had a slight indisposition that kept me away from the brasserie for a week. One evening, I returned, Monsieur Andier was wandering around with a napkin over his arm,. ‘So, Monsieur Melanski has left for Montivilliers, then?’ he said to me. ‘For Montivilliers,’ I replied. ‘What’s that?’ I confess to you that I thought that Melanski had used with the worthy Monsieur Andier a procedure very familiar to those who want to withdraw from an old supplier. I went to his house the same evening to make sure that he was there. It was necessary to yield to the evidence. Melanski is presently practicing medicine in Montivilliers, in the département of the Seine-Inférieure, and has been for five months.”

  “Since we know his address,” I said to Mauplaisant, “It’s necessary to write to him to find out what insect has stung him.”

  “Write to him if you want,” replied Mauplaisant, curtly. “As for me, I give up on him, because I think it stupid to give marks of attention to a fellow who cares so little for me.”

  That specious and oft-repeated argument did not convince me. I had for Melanski one of those sympathies that no offended self-esteem can compromise. I wrote to him.

  My letter, so far as I can recall its terms, expressed, not as a reproach but as a psychological verity of universal application, the idea that our most vivacious affections, by a fatal law of nature, always come to be resorbed into the soul and foment other affections. I told him, more or less, that my relationship with him, although apparently terminated, had nevertheless left me with an ineffaceable memory, doubtless because its cessation constituted for me a moral loss, and was genuinely harmful to me. I added that our synnoëty—that was what we called our faculty of thinking in perfect accord—might deteriorate under the influences of opposed habits, and that if we met again someday, it was a good bet that we’d be in the heart of the tower of Babel. Finally, according to our cherished custom, I juggled, so to speak, with the most terribly cutting remarks, convinced that I was not wounding him or myself, and full of the sang-froid that distinguishes the juggler of daggers.

  Alas, when one has a somewhat philosophical mind, one likes to stick a finger into the depths of things, no matter how muddy they might be; one finds a certain provocative savor in reasoned scorn for oneself and others; one etches disappointment as one had etched confidence; one puts glory into diagnosing that which might exist beneath the best semblances.

  II

  A month went by; of Melanski, no news. I knew him too well to attribute that prolongation of his silence to the offense that my letter might have caused him. I had given proof therein of a frankness that ought rather to have awakened his own, always ready, and as if in the forefront of his heart.

  Was he ashamed of having fled far away from me without extending a hand to me, and did he not know how to apologize for that? No. That shame and embarrassment would have been appropriate to a common man; they were far beneath Melanski. The silence in which he preserved himself indicated, in my opinion, the indefinite prolongation of a state of mind that I had experienced many times, and which we had baptized pantophobia—which is to say, sovereign, tyrannical, universal disgust, as invasive as the waters of the Deluge, capable of submerging even the holy ark of duty, amour and pity.

  One morning, however, I received the following letter:

  My dear Synnoëte,

  You are, then, even more skeptical than I am. You have a serene desolation in thought, a terrible mildness in expression, and a scornful esteem for human relationships that would frighten me if I had not caressed it twenty times over and domesticated it in my way of thinking.

  Do you know what all that is? It is the unmasked enigma of the eternal sphinx, a sphinx more redoubtable than that of Oedipus, for we have divined it, and him, and have fallen nonetheless into its disenchantment, while he pursues his route skirting the disenchanted generations. Well, we still retain the superiority over the naïve victims that we can analyze our fall and support it coolly as a necessary thing. Oh, my poor friend, nothing demonstrates to me the essential concordance of our souls—or rather their definitive and irrevocable fusion—more clearly than your judicious suspicion of the banal humanity of which we have our part.

  That banal humanity, which is humanity, properly speaking, will give to our amity the destiny it wishes; perhaps it will leave no trace of it; perhaps it will induce you, as it has already induced me with regard to you, to make little of me; but we possess in addition a little of the transcendent humanity that, overlooking proceedings from a great height, careless of what they are, has linked us forever by the summit of intelligence.

  Blurred by one of those stupidities that ruin superficial amities on a daily basis, it would be impossible for our ideal amity to be damaged by it. Our thoughts, if not our hands, will incessantly encounter one another in the same speculation, alone but face to face, and will embrace passionately, like twin sisters held in slavery by barbarians.

  You might have conserve some resentment against me for not having bade you farewell—in terms of the flesh, for in terms of the spirit, not having quit you but taken you with me, I had no adieu to bid you—but your rancor could not have rendered us strangers to one another. Fortunately, you do not even hold it against me.

  It seems that with the perfect knowledge that you have of me, you have sniffed, around my abrupt departure, a bizarre, extra-personal, imperious motive: one of those motives that are only appropriate to the height of our chimeras, and that no one except us could have.

  What, then, is that motive?

  Frankly, my dear Synnoëte, I prefer to hide it from you, not only because it is too subtle, too unexpected and too insensate to be comprehended right away, even by you, but also because the shame that I would have in confessing it to you would be beyond my strength. Don’t interrogate me. In any case, if I replied to you, you would have the pain of observing that I am going mad, and I would have the hurtful pleasure of establishing my madness once and for all. Oh, my friend, that reason, whose deceptive amplitude you would admire, is like the frog in the fable...it would burst. And an absurd mirage has sufficed to operate a lesion that will always expand.

  Why were you not in Paris when that terrible mirage was about to take possession of me? You would have defended me against it; you would have shown me that I was being ridiculous; you would have opened my eyes; you would have taken out of my hands the deadly plaything that hazard or fatality had put into them, as one takes away from a child the pistol that he had imprudently picked up. There was time then to save me from the abyss into which my imagination, overstimulated by voluntary solitude, has dragged me since.

  But no, you were absent, and if I do not have the courage, now that my madness has developed monstrously, to reveal it to you, I would have feared even more to show it at its commencement, innocent as it was, to anyone but you. Keeping it to myself, I left, but not
in the hope of fleeing the object of a demoralizing preoccupation; on contrary, I left—would you believe it?—in order to find myself more absorbed by that object, scarcely suspecting that it would bring me to where I am. But I don’t want give any greater proportions to something that must remain an enigma for you.

  Suppose that I had an amour beyond all plausibility, the scenes of which have no analogue except in nightmare. I am presently subject to the effects of that amour for, thank God, the cause has disappeared. I am far from having returned to my anterior state, however. My mind and body are entirely disturbed, although I defy anyone to perceive it, so much do I stiffen myself. The struggle that I sustain against myself in public renders the evil worse. The relaxation is more complete in proportion to the tension, and relaxation here might be more fatal for me, for it is the free return of my abominable fantasies.

  If your friendship for me has not become entirely ideal and can perhaps be rendered practical, I implore you, my dear Synnoëte, to come and spend some time with me, in order to treat me. You alone might find the means to heal the poor physician by distracting him, as soon as he has satisfied his clientele, which is already numerous and captivating—yes, I said “captivating.” My God, yes; that is why I shall not willingly return to Paris, which mysterious fatality caused me to quit. Furthermore, I think of you as I think about the French flag; wherever it is, that is France; wherever you come, my Paris will come—which is to say that you will bring it to me in Montivilliers.

  “Come on, a good deed! Take the train to Le Havre, and in Le Havre you will find an omnibus that will bring you to my home in three-quarters on an hour, via a road frayed long a valley with multiple crop-fields, between two delightful hills. Having arrived in Montivilliers, you have only to ask for the new doctor, or “the Pole,” and anyone will show you my door. The country is very pretty, the sea is close by. You, who like walking, reverie and labor towed gently by nonchalance, will be very comfortable here. I don’t despair of keeping you for a few months—the time, for example, for you to wrote a novel from the first word to the last. We have a public library, if you please, and in the church there is a Simon’s Feast that merits being seen.