The Second Life of Doctor Albin

by Raoul Gineste

  It was necessary at all costs that Jacques Liban and Charles Balin disappear. Such individuals, possessors of a criminal record, watched by the police, stained by a wretched past, would have a very slender authority to combat the doctrines of the famous Dr. Albin. It was, moreover, probable that if the bone-setter Balin dared to present himself to the Faculty in order to take his examination there, he would not be welcomed with the greatest indulgence. It would be very dangerous to procure identity papers in the name of Charles Balin; he might be charged with forgery of official documents, and then it would be forced labor. He therefore required a new name for a new identity. Once in London and advised to the demands of the agency, he would make a decision.

  So, under another mask, which he would strive to render as dissimilar as possible to the preceding ones, he would return to Paris and would not be recognized.

  A mortal chagrin and a profound distress invaded him. It would be necessary, for that, to leave Mariette! Would she consent to it? Could she? It was, however, certain that if he stayed with Mariette, it would not be long before he was recognized, suspected, and paralyzed in all his enterprises. The agent dogging their heels would not lose sight of her again.

  Mariette was, therefore, a dangerous obstacle, and he had to choose between two alternatives: either to stay with her and try to realize his projects in deplorable conditions; or to leave her temporarily, reappear after a further metamorphosis and put to work all the advantages that absolute liberty, a stainless identity and official titles would procure him.

  Did he have any right to hesitate? Was Mariette not incidental to his existence? Ought he to forget his noble goal any longer?

  Evidently, no, yes, and no.

  He would therefore demonstrate to his mistress the absolute necessity of that temporary separation; but before leaving her, before even informing her of that cruel resolution, he would devote a few more months to her existence.

  She was still, he felt sure, fundamentally haunted by regret for her past successes. He had surprised her reading the scripts of fashionable plays and attempting to declaim; it was in giving her that new position in conformity with her secret desires that he would console her and enable her to accept an inevitable departure.

  The ideas that he had already resifted many times received a definitive sanction during his sojourn in prison.

  The first person he saw on emerging from Saint-Pélagie was Mariette, who was waiting for him in a fiacre, impatient and overexcited. She fell into his arms and kissed him with a violence and an agitation that surprised him.

  “How you’re trembling!” he observed.

  “It’s nothing—a little anger, that’s all.”

  “Caused by what—or whom?”

  “That agent of the Sûreté, whom I perceived again as I came here. During your absence he’s never ceased to prowl around the shop and spy on my every move. I wonder what he’s trying to do?”

  “Doubtless push you to extremes, to exasperate you, to profit from some insult to cause trouble for you.”

  “It’s possible, unless he wants to assure himself personally that I’m no longer on the game.”

  “It’s scarcely probable. He wouldn’t dare to indulge in such maneuvers. I’m no longer a vagabond and you’re not the Bohemian of old. We’re legitimate, Mariette, and you have no idea of the social value of that word. Legitimacy is a file on which the reptilian individual would be advised not to damage his teeth.”

  “He’s capable of anything,” said Mariette, whose eyes filled with tears. “Hasn’t he spread it around the quarter that I’ve had a registration number?”

  “The cowardly wretch.”

  “He’d better not show himself again now that you’re back,” she snarled, menacingly.

  “What would you do? You’re being silly—that would be to fall into his trap.” He seized the opportunity. “Look, we ought to sell the stationer’s, if we can get a reasonable price, and shake him off our track.”

  “Perhaps you’re right, but what will I do then?”

  “We’ll think about it; there’s no urgency.”

  They hastened back to the shop. Several invalids notified of his release were waiting to consult him, which annoyed him; he did not want to start again. He would care for them later, since he would have the right.”

  “Let’s close the shop for today,” he said, toward evening. “I need some air; we’ll go for a walk and celebrate.”

  “With pleasure,” said Mariette. “That’s the first time I’ve ever heard you say those words.”

  He had not said them without intention.

  They confided the sale of newspapers to an obliging neighbor and went down the Faubourg du Temple. It was time for the return from work; like a rising tide, floods of human heads were emerging in the distance with vague undulations. Workers curbed under the burden of tool-boxes, their hands and faces blackened by manual labor of factory smoke, and women laden with needlework that they were delivering or taking away, were climbing the slope with sad smiles on their faces: the smiles of tasks accomplished; the resigned smiles of wage-earners cowed by poverty. Modest clerks and sprightly shop-girls marched at a faster pace. Housewives, purses in hand, in the summary clothing of women going to market, were besieging handcarts loaded with no-longer-fresh victuals or allowing themselves to be convinced by the seductive offers of rubicund apprentice butchers who hailed them as they passed. A reek of vitriolated absinthe emerged from all the drinking dens. At the street-corners, and the entrances to passages, compact groups surrounded ambulant artistes and young seamstresses, their songs in their hands, awkwardly trying to follow the singer’s voice.

  Mariette stopped in front of a rotisserie and was admiring the chaplet of gilded birds rotating over the blazing wood fire. He looked from side to side at wrinkled brows, shining gazes, lips retaining saliva. The anguish and hunger of old return to mind. He had an imperceptible surge of ill-humor.

  “Better to eat them than look at them,” he said. “You’re wasting precious time; let’s go to a restaurant so we can come out early, if the desire takes us to go somewhere.”

  The delivered themselves to the glorious sin of gluttony, drank select wines and branded liqueurs, and then, without a precise goal, followed the crowd that was taking advantage of the last five days.

  It was the first time, for a long time, that they had walked along the grand boulevards together in the evening. Mariette’s attire was simple but in perfect taste; nothing about her evoked the brazen streetwalker or the excessively elegant Rose Gontran of the Folies Nouvelles, whose city costumes were a little too similar to those of the stage. The astonishing facility she had for adapting to the environment in which circumstances placed her had made her a petty bourgeois Parisienne in the process of celebrating some family anniversary. She was able to go past the corner of the Rue du Faubourg-Montmartre with impunity, with no fear of being recognized.

  Old Lucie, always solid at her post, was already on duty. Mariette shuddered on seeing her, and a tear escaped her eye.

  “Poor woman,” she sighed. “Poor woman! That’s how I was, not three years ago. Let’s go, quickly, I beg you.”

  They increased their pace and remained silent for a few moments. The nervous movements that Mariette’s arms were making indicated a salutary terror of the past. She was painting, seemingly fleeing some imaginary danger.

  “Why are you running like that?” he asked. “There’s no hurry.”

  “This sidewalk would burn my feet,” she replied, in a muffled and resolute voice that he was not hearing for the first time, “if it ever tried to take me back!”

  He hastened to interrupt her. “Are you crazy to think of such impossibilities? Isn’t there already a profound abyss between the present and the past? Haven’t you redeemed your shame, first by talent and then by work?”

  “Talent,” murmured Mariette, sadly. “A paltry talent, which couldn’t resist a few marks on the face. As for work,” she added, in a low voice “
who knows what the future has in store for us?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Will I have the strength to work, if you’re no longer there?”

  “I’ve got an idea!” he exclaimed, to change the subject. “Today’s a feast day: Holy Deliverance. It’s necessary to talk like prisoners, because I’m out of prison. What if we were to go to the theater?”

  The impressionable Mariette immediately cheered up.

  “I’d never have dared to ask you,” she confessed, “but that would give me the greatest pleasure.” She added almost immediately: “Unless it would give me the greatest chagrin. Never mind—let’s go. Perhaps it will stop me getting gloomy.”

  They deliberated for a moment in order to consult their taste. La Périchole was advertised on the poster for the Variétés. She knew the score, had read the eulogistic appreciations of the singer who was playing the title role; it was there that she wanted to go.

  They went in. Poor Rose Gontran, happy at first and then gripped by an extraordinary excitement, murmured in her lover’s ear that, without boasting, she guaranteed that she could sing as well and better than that, and soon fell into a profound melancholy.

  The hubbub of the entr’acte led to a diversion. They had gone to the lobby; a theater gossip columnist recognized the ex-star of the Folies Nouvelles and approached her.

  “Mademoiselle Rose Gontran! What a pleasant surprise!”

  “What?” she replied, radiantly. “I’m still recognizable?”

  “I wouldn’t have recognized you otherwise,” the journalist replied, laughing. “Come on, when’s the comeback?”

  “Alas, Monsieur, just look at me.” She lifted her veil with a swift gesture. “How do you think I’d dare to set foot on stage with this pock-marked face?”

  “You’re exaggerating, Mademoiselle. I don’t think you’ve changed as much as all that. Besides which, beauty is only indispensable to mediocre artistes; with the talent you have, you could get by, if necessary.”

  “Thank you for you gallant words,” Rose stammered, blushing with pleasure, “but I take them at their worth—which is to say, for the delicate politeness of a charming man.”

  They returned to their seats. The pensive Mariette was only listening to the play with a distracted ear.

  “Fundamentally, you were wrong to bring me here,” she sighed as they left. “It’s revived my dolors and caused my regrets to be reborn. When one’s intoxicated by this milieu, when you’ve seen all gazes devouring you and all hands applauding you, it’s hard to think that it’s finished, all over.”

  “Who knows, Mariette?”

  “What do you mean? Am I not disfigured? Do you think I took the flattering words of that well-brought up man for sincerity?”

  “The journalist isn’t so far from the truth as you think.”

  Surprised, she stopped and stared at him. “Are you speaking seriously or trying to drive me mad? Shut up. I’m ugly—fearfully ugly.”

  “Much less than I feared,” he replied, without appearing to perceive her emotion. “Time has already greatly attenuated the ravages of the accursed malady; your mirror is there to tell you that; the lines of your face have regained almost all their purity. With the distance of the stage, intelligently made up, you could produce an excellent effect, and if, as I’ve explained before, you can no longer operate in the same genre, nevertheless...”

  She closed his mouth with her hands, and then started kissing him madly, as if to belie what his lips were saying.

  “Naughty,” she said. “Don’t blow on a fire that ought to go out, don’t release hopes that I’ve locked away irrevocably in the depths of my heart.”

  The weather was good; they went home on foot. At the corner of the Rue de la Lune she had a hunger for a galette that she hastened to satisfy. She started devouring it first with her beautiful teeth, with a child-like joy; then she suddenly became somber and stopped eating, as if she hated the past, even in her most innocent memories.

  “Poor girl!” she sighed, taking his arm again.

  “Who are talking about?”

  “The unfortunate who once, in this same place, soothed her hunger with two or three sous’ worth of galette.”

  “Why always evoke the past, Mariette? Let’s expel it from our minds, let’s think about the future.”

  But the past, that evening, was obstinate in surging forth. Near the Château d’Eau, a monumental woman whose stride had the imposing gait of a Dutch cutter with the wind in its sails, went past them going in the opposite direction. A victim of the law of contrasts, the minuscule Père Lampe was navigating in Nini Nichon’s wake.

  He had once frequented too many intern’s wards to resist the desire to commit a mischief.

  “Above all, Messieurs,” he shouted, “I recommend silence.”

  The dwarf, furious at being recognized, veered away and disappeared into the shadows, while the fat whore, sensing that she was no longer being followed, slowed her pace and then stopped, to scrutinize the boulevard in all directions.

  “The stolen money has scarcely profited her,” remarked Mariette, with an indifference that augured well.

  They resumed walking, both plunged in their reflections. The encounter with Père Lampe had reminded him of Raphael. What had become of him?

  “What are you thinking about?” Mariette ended up asking, troubled by the long silence.

  “Things already distant and heart-rending, miseries and corruptions that have explained to me why, on a given day, the paving stones rise up of their own accord into barricades, and why energetic unknowns struggle ferociously until the last breath, solely for the pleasure of killing.”

  Chapter XXVI

  The seed that he had sown in such favorable ground did not take long to germinate and grow. Mariette, hooked by the hope of a new debut, immediately wanted to return to study.

  They sold the stationer’s shop in Belleville and rented a small apartment in the Rue Lepic. They had about twelve thousand francs in hand, and it was agreed that that sum would remain intact. If circumstances obliged them to separate temporarily, they would each take half.

  “Why are you talking about circumstances that might separate us?” Mariette had interrogated him, anxiously.

  “Because I have a mission to fulfill,” he replied, “and it will be necessary for me to reclaim my liberty when the time comes.”

  Mariette, nonplussed, became somber and taciturn.

  “Oh, our separation won’t be definitive,” he hastened to affirm, “We’ll surely find one another later, and we can then, if you still love me—for you’ll still be young and I’m marching rapidly toward decrepitude—resume our communal life without cares and without remorse. But let’s not talk about that, since the time hasn’t come.”

  On the contrary, Mariette, as if to deflect him from his mysterious and incomprehensible projects, caused the dream of a happy existence to shine: she would make her debut in the theater, earn tidy sums. She knew, of course, that she would not have the same successes as before, but she would be living the life of which she dreamed, and he would devote himself to his favorite research; nothing would any longer come to trouble their happiness. She looked up at him then. He contented himself with shaking his head.

  “Let’s begin by working relentlessly. You’ll make your debut, and then we’ll see.” He thus prepared her, little by little, to accept without too much surprise and chagrin the separation that he judged to be necessarily imminent.

  At that moment he was carrying out research on the fermentation of wine on behalf of a notable merchant. Mariette was taking a course in declamation and spent the rest of the day learning roles. In the evenings, he made her rehearse, lavishing her with advice and accompanying her on the piano. He would have preferred that his mistress set her sights on an entirely serious genre; he found powerful dramatic qualities in her; in his opinion, she would have succeeded in passionate roles. But Mariette, wanting to utilize her voice, had a weakness for operetta;
perhaps she would rediscover her formed success there? She had not graduated from the Conservatoire, had not passed through any of the usual channels, how could she make the most of her dramatic qualities? What theater would consent to put her forward? It was necessary to begin by accepting minor parts, and then…whereas the past successes of Rose Gontran might serve as a trampoline for a neighboring genre.

  If he had had the design of associating his entire life with Mariette’s, he would have imposed his will on her, but since he had to leave her, he did not think that he had the right to oppose her desire.

  His chemical work was reasonably well-paid; he was putting some money aside and was relatively happy, when an accident, banal for anyone else, took on a menacing gravity for him.

  The scientific and technical journals were making a great fuss about the new explosives that the European powers, armed to the teeth, were putting to trial. That gave him the idea of studying certain combinations of nitric acid with organic compounds, and he was able to fabricate a powder whose power surpassed that of all the detonating mixtures.

  The wine merchant, already glimpsing the gleam of millions, became enthused with the idea and furnished him with the means to develop it.

  The laboratory experiments having been satisfactory, it only remained to carry out a conclusive trial. They close a large garden in the suburb where the merchant had his warehouse, and only employed a small quantity of the substance. Even so, the explosion was so conclusive that all the windows in the neighborhood were shattered. There was talk of a bomb, successive attacks in London having awakened the suspicion of the police.