The Second Life of Doctor Albin

by Raoul Gineste

  A few days later, a place having been found in another surgical ward, the recommended convalescent was dressed in his smock and circled by the regulation apron.

  The head of service, one of his old rivals, to whom the new subordinate was introduced, inspected him with a rapid glance.

  “Why, it’s Père Albin!!” he exclaimed, observing the resemblance. He started laughing; his pupils joined in chorus, and the soubriquet remained to him among his colleagues.

  Soon, the new orderly gave evidence of singularly astonishing surgical aptitudes. He begged the interns and pupils to let him undertake a few dressings, a favor that the idle hastened to accord to him. He put a passion, a contentment and a skill into it that surprised everyone.

  “Where did you learn all that?” asked the chief of service, brought up to date. He repeated his story of interrupted studies

  “Aren’t you, rather, some provincial bone-setter? There are, it’s said, some who are very skillful.”

  The orderly tried to protest.

  “Don’t defend yourself,” added the chief of service. “Some pork-butchers, not to mention amphitheater assistants, carry out disarticulations I wouldn’t disavow.”

  The skill that the newcomer showed earned him some consideration at first; the pupils established laudatory comparisons between his dressings and those of the interns, and the latter, often in haste to leave, confided their work to him on more than one occasion. But the services that the orderly strove to render did not take long to become a source of trouble. One thing earned him a disgrace from which he ought to have taken a lesson. Several times without be instructed, he remade dressings that he thought badly executed. There was in that action a usurpation of function complicated by a kind of criticism that could not be tolerated. The offended interns forbade him to touch their dressings thereafter, and never missed an opportunity to treat him as a servant.

  Charles Balin tried for some time to hold himself in check, but involuntarily, surges of impatience, authoritarian observations and occasional rude comments escaped him in confrontation with a lack of skill or a hesitation. It was not admissible than an orderly should dare to correct or criticize those to whom he owed submission and respect; everyone ganged up against him, and even his colleagues, initially full of admiration for is incontestable superiority, but rapidly becoming jealous, treated him as a black sheep.

  He requested a transfer; the director, after having reprimanded him and warned him that in case of recidivism he would be obliged to dismiss him, consented to it.

  The orderly kept quiet for another month, telling himself that he was, after all, in the wrong, that Dr. Albin himself would not have suffered such anarchy in his staff, and that, socially speaking, the intrinsic value of an individual ought not to be above the position he occupied.

  Soon, however, an event that caused a certain noise in the hospital world was imputed to the surprising orderly: several errors of diagnosis had been corrected on the placards!

  Taken to task, he strenuously denied any responsibility for that bold action, which damaged the reputation of a renowned surgeon. The latter, unable to admit that an orderly was capable of giving him lessons, insisted that he be sacked, but there was no proof and he was spared again.

  A final incident, however, completed the measure.

  A worker employed in roughcasting fell from the scaffolding, sustaining grievous wounds in the thigh, and was immediately taken to the hospital. A considerable hemorrhage endangered his life; a few more minutes and the man would be dead.

  It was about two o’clock; no surgeon was there. The intern on duty, as was required, attempted a ligature of the femoral artery, but he had lost his composure groping and could not find the artery. Yielding to an irresistible surge of impatience, the audacious orderly, who was serving as his aide, suddenly took the scalpel from his hand, shoved him away without saying a word, discovered the artery in the blink of an eye and tied it off.

  At a stroke, the situation was no longer tolerable; the astounded young surgeon had not breathed a word, but rumor of the incident spread rapidly. The following day, the director summoned him again.

  “Monsieur,” he said to him, with an involuntary respect, “you did something yesterday that in itself in perhaps worthy of praise, but which nevertheless obliges me to criticize you and dismiss you. You took on a very heavy responsibility that you were not entitled to bear. You did, in truth, succeed in that delicate enterprise, but admit that if the injured man had died in your hands, what might have followed. Can you imagine the scandal? All the newspapers in Paris would report that the Hospital allows patients to be butchered by orderlies in the face of the most distinguished surgeons! You can see the raising of shields from here. If someone dies in the hands of a physician, no one can raise any protest; his scientific qualifications are a guarantee for society, but in the hands of a ward attendant! I would, with every right, throw him out immediately. Go then, if you please; exercise your talents elsewhere. Yesterday, chance favored you; tomorrow, your vanity, give an appetite, might cause you to commit the worst blunders. Here’s the account I’ve prepared; present it to the cahier.”

  Charles Balin, having argued the urgency of the case and force majeure, made the observation that a human life was at stake and that he was sure of himself, since he had succeeded.

  The honorable director was intractable. A surgeon, denying all evidence, putting concern for human life below his whim, could obstinately refuse to apply antiseptic in his service; he found that quite natural, or, at least, not his concern. But an orderly, even if he saved a man’s life, had to be severely punished for daring to take on the role of a qualified individual. The exceptional success did not justify the monstrosity of the action. The reasons that the subaltern tried to put forward could only have value among people with no social organization, in a land where rules were made to be broken and diplomas were issued without conferring any prerogative.

  Chapter XXI

  Desolate, but obliged to recognize himself the social logic of the outcome. Charles Balin quit the smock and apron that he had worn with joy and honor for more than three months. He had not spent a sou of his meager wages, had received meager New Year’s gifts, and relatives of patients grateful for his attentions had sometimes slipped the modest offerings of poor folk into his hand; he could therefore take his time and search for an employment. He would continue his scientific work as soon as fortune had smiled on him a little. It was necessary before anything else to be sure of being able to live and not fall back into the tenebrous in pace in which he had almost left his intelligence and his skin.

  He went back to his domicile on the Ile St-Louis, passed his cherished manuscripts in review, tidied himself up somewhat, and headed with no precise goal toward the grand boulevards. The first thing that struck his eyes was a large poster with a portrait of a woman:

  FOLIES NOUVELLES every evening ROSE GONTRAN.

  Damn! he thought, Mariette’s making rapid progress; already a star of the first magnitude.

  A real pleasure inundated his soul. He had read in the newspapers, from time to time, laudatory appreciations of his pupil, but he had not imagined such a rapid and brilliant vogue. The registered prostitute who had been walking the streets scarcely a year ago was today bringing all Paris to her feet! She was, therefore, out of all poverty, in a position to live luxuriously, to follow her tastes and satisfy her caprices—and all that was his work; he was the good genie of that unexpected metamorphosis!

  Put in a good mood, he treated himself to a succulent dinner washed down by a generous wine. Then, enlivened by that small intemperance, he headed for the Folies Nouvelles. He wanted to hear Rose, observe her progress for himself. Lost in the crowd of spectators, she would not see him or would not recognize him. Perhaps she was no longer even thinking about him?

  He bought a ticket and hid himself in the discreet penumbra of the gallery.

  Young women in opulent but garish dresses—export items—old much
-decorated gentlemen, party-goers in suits with flowers in their buttonholes, Englishmen in check jackets that reminded him of the accursed rags of old and provincials in violation of conjugal fidelity were heaped up in groups or walking around at a slow pace.

  The spectacle was encumbered with acrobatic exercises and clownish pantomimes, which bored him. A kind of almost-silent expectation and the accumulation of auditors in the most favorable spots announced to him the appearance of the Star. Soon, in fact, the orchestra launched into a seguidilla, thunderous applause brought the house down, and Rose Gontran came on stage.

  With her mantilla, her short skirt, latticed with black silk on a yellow background heightened with jonquil ribbons, her half-naked breasts florid with blood-colored carnations, her features accentuated, her large eyes circled with bistre, her almost masculine forehead, her elegant slender legs, and beneath the floods of oxyacetylene light that enveloped her, causing the silk to gleam and her diamonds to sparkle, bringing out the pallor of her uniformly mat complexion, she was still not pretty in the dainty sense of the word, but beautiful, with a beauty full of enticement.

  His heart beat forcefully, and a frisson ran through him to the marrow of his bones.

  She sang, to the Spanish tunes that he had once taught her, filthy words emphasized by feline movements of the hips and vulgar but graceful gestures.

  The success immediately took on triumphant proportions: acclamations, enthusiastic encores, and a rain of flowers; nothing was lacking. By the end, the delirium was at its height. Radiant with joy, she apologized for having run out of strength and made her exit, blowing mischievous kisses.

  Charles Balin found himself leaning against an open box in which the two cavaliers serving a golden-haired demi-mondaine were making themselves noticeable by the warmth of their bravos.

  “Wonderful, superb, stunning, amazing!” cried one of the young men, who never ran out of eulogies.

  “What enthusiasm!” his neighbor ended up saying, with a hint of jealousy. “Are you infatuated with that Montmartrean Spaniard?”

  “Why not? She’s worth the trouble, I think.”

  “In that case, my lad, you can dig deep, if you have pockets,” the golden-haired beauty assured him. “Rose Gontran doesn’t want a lover. She doesn’t like men.”

  “Really?”

  “Try—you’ll see.”

  “What does she love, then?” asked the other, feigning naivety.

  “You’re indiscreet, Alfred. Go ask her.”

  “All the same, these good little comrades, insinuations don’t cost them anything.”

  “Damn! Listen, it isn’t me, it’s her who says it. Look, yesterday evening we were eating at the next table at Peters, and just between us, drinking champagne and eavesdropping. She was with Baron de Ramel, who was pressing her hard.”

  “The handsome, irresistible de Ramel?”

  “The same. Doubtless he’d just made her some firm proposition, for Rose started laughing in his face. ‘No, no, my lad!’ she cried. ‘Comrade, as much as you like, anything else, never! Men! I don’t need them anymore; I’ve known too many in my life and they disgust me too much. I’ve only ever loved one; he was old, not handsome and poor; me, I was young and beginning to have talent, money, success, and he didn’t want me anymore!’”

  “Pooh! It’s an affectation, like any other, to excite desire and raise the price. Look, if you want my opinion, it’s fashionable in a certain milieu, to go to Lesbos, but fundamentally, it’s a pose.”

  “A pose! A pose!” repeated the beautiful young woman, writhing. “What reason would she have, then, for always having that filthy old seal trailing after her?”

  “A seal?”

  “You can see, in the front row of the stalls, that fat common whore, decked out like an inmate of the Darcy.”

  Charles Balin looked in the direction indicated. Still fat, ignoble, but richly rigged out in a garish fashion, Nini Nichon was lounging in one of the orchestra stalls.

  So it was for that that he’d wasted ten months of his new life, so short and so precious! Sickened, he was about to leave, the obligatory final ballet having no interest for him, when he thought he recognized the tall Annette marching toward him.

  He was not mistaken; the svelte blonde, still beautiful and desirable, was nonchalalantly following the stream of strollers. What was she doing in this place, denuded of pianists?

  He overtook her, turned round and looked at her, smiling.

  “Monsieur Charles!” she exclaimed, recognizing him in her turn. “That’s funny! I was just thinking about you a moment ago!”

  “Good or bad?”

  “Both. But perhaps you’re waiting for Rose Gontran and...”

  “I haven’t been waiting for Rose for a long time.”

  “Yes, yes, I know,” she said, with a knowing air. “It appears that she’s conjugating the verb amour in the feminine.”

  He cut her off swiftly. “I left Rose of my own accord.”

  “Then I can ask you without indiscretion to offer me a glass of beer.”

  “With pleasure, Mademoiselle.” They went into the winter garden and sat to one side.

  “Ah!” sighed the great Annette, “that Rose Gontran truly has all the luck. She’s a star, the newspapers talk about her, her picture plasters the walls, the directors cover her with gold—and all that’s your work, because without you, without your lessons, what would she be? Nothing, less than nothing. It’s you who launched her; she still be walking the streets if she hadn’t been your mistress.”

  “There is, in fact, some truth in what you say.”

  The beautiful Annette uttered a profound sigh. “And to think that if you’d wanted, it could have been the same for me!”

  “Perhaps, but not in the same fashion, though.”

  “What do you mean?” said Annette leaning very close to him.

  “Are you willing to hear the truth, the whole truth? You might perhaps be able to take advantage of it.”

  “Explain yourself—you’re making me impatient.”

  “Well, until now you’ve been following a false path. Once again, excuse my frankness but you’ve always interested me.”

  “Speak with an open heart.”

  “It’s not sufficient to love music and singing to become a musician and singer; it also needs natural gifts, which determination can develop but can’t give us. Now those indispensable qualities, without wishing to offend you, you don’t possess in a high enough degree.”

  “Oh!” said the pretty woman, disappointed.

  “But,” he said, “you’re tall, well made, and, according to rumor, a good girl, although a trifle inconstant; you have a whim that pushes you toward the stage. Set your sights on dancing. I’m a good prophet and a good judge—Rose Gontran is the proof of that. You’ll succeed.”

  “What an idea!” exclaimed the great Annette delighted. “I sense that what you’re saying is true—it’s like a revelation. And I never thought of it! I fact, I adore dancing.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “It’s not too late; a few months of serious study and you can debut as chorus girl at the Folies. Your fine figure, your beauty and your grace will do the rest.” Laughing, he added: “You’ll never get to the Opéra, it’s true, but you’ll acquire the notoriety for which you have such a great desire.”

  In her enthusiasm, Annette would willingly have thrown her arms around him; she could see herself already, acclaimed, recalled by a delirious audience. She looked at him tenderly; he felt a quivering of the flesh run through him. A languor full of softness invaded him; the lust that the sight of the other had just stirred up rose rapidly to the surface. Nevertheless, he dared not make an advance, fearing a refusal that, after all, would only be a legitimate revenge.

  Annette, for her part, had had too many previous disappointments to issue a categorical invitation.

  He had just paid for the drinks.

  “Are you free
this evening?” he sighed.

  “Yes!” she hastened to respond. “Why?”

  “Because if, by chance, you’re afraid to walk home alone,” he replied, smiling, “I’d be glad to accompany you.”

  “As far as the door?”

  “And even further.”

  “You’re not afraid that Rose Gontran might see us?” she said, mockingly, as she took his arm.

  “I no longer love her,” he murmured, gripped by a dull ager. “I never loved her. Come on.”

  This time, the great Annette could affirm, without fear of contradiction, that not one of Père Antoine’s pianists had resisted her enchantments. Already, in the fiacre that carried them toward the Boulevard Montparnasse, the pretty vampire was devouring her prey with kisses.

  Monsieur Charles had lost nothing by waiting.

  Chapter XXII

  That amorous adventure, born of resentment as much as hazard, had the ephemeral duration of the longest of Annette’s caprices. He had imagined that the beautiful woman would make him forget the other, but he perceived, as soon as the next day, that nothing could tear Mariette out of his heart.

  The malevolent insinuations he had heard at the Folies Nouvelles represented to him Rose Gontran in the grip once again of her vicious past, returned to the crapulous milieu from which he thought he had liberated her; ought he, however, to trust the gossip of some rival? Alas, the presence of Nini Nichon, whose appearance denounced that she was sponging on Mariette corroborated the accusation.

  After all, what was astonishing about it? Had he not left her in a situation that was, it is true, less repulsive, but just as degrading as that of old? The price of the act did not wash away the stain. There would not have been a great difference between the high-cost Rose Gontran and Mariette whoring at a discount on the sidewalk. From the moral viewpoint, in fact, the state of the rich prostitute was perhaps even more despicable, since it did not have imminent destitution as an excuse.