The Second Life of Doctor Albin

by Raoul Gineste

  At the moment when he thought that the coveted goal would be easily attained, an evil wind dissolves the deceptive mirage; the official titles that he judged indispensable and on the aid of which he counted so much, seem to be a weapon that destiny has turned against him. He regrets no longer being a bone-setter!

  Perhaps, he thinks, it’s my status as a foreigner that is the cause of all these disappointments? But a hundred others around him only succeed thanks to that status; it is, therefore, within himself, and only within himself, that he must seek the cause of his incredible bad luck.

  Then an insurmountable discouragement invades him. It is true, then, that one cannot recommence one’s life with impunity.

  He knows now that to arrive at the most infimal social position it is necessary to travel the beaten path, to go through all the stages, to obtain all the guarantees, to conquer all the diplomas; he knows, now, that to please the crowd and dominate them, it is necessary to have the advantage of youth, beauty, activity or power. Why did he break the links to his past? Why did he throw overboard the advantages that resulted from his personal efforts and social complicities? Who can return him the gifts that no mortal receives twice and what will become of his work, now that he has lost the absolute confidence that gives audacity, the physical vigor that permits dogged work, the assurance of a living that procures the insouciance of material needs? What are intelligence and genius worth without that?

  If, at least, the love he has always had for the wretched could sustain him—but his altruism has not emerged unscathed from the struggle for existence; although he always excuses the weak and the stupid, he no longer has the strength to tolerate them; although injustice revolts him, stupidity irritates him and although he pities the victims, their resignation disgusts him, he cannot help despising them.

  Is he going to allow himself to be beaten by so many disillusionments and ordeals?

  A thousand times no! He will make superhuman efforts. Too bad if his reason totters.

  He works day and night, puts all his notes in order, rewrites the enormous treatise that will destroy the work of Dr. Albin, and sets out in quest of a publisher.

  Those who once humbly solicited the favor of putting him in print sent him away with ironic smiles or insolent forthrightness. Others demand the twenty-five or thirty thousand francs necessary for the publication of the work. Only one asks him to leave his manuscript; he will have its read and appraised by competent chemists and will publish the work if it has the value he claims.

  That proposal, although perfectly logical, does not satisfy him at all; he knows the competent chemists in question only too well. They are enemies or rivals; they will rob him shamelessly or suppress the work; he is not sufficiently naïve to hand them the key to his decisive experiments.

  He has recourse to the Press again, publishing without flagrant proofs combative articles in which acrimony and bitterness play too large a part. Audacious denials, mordant criticisms, cruel ironies and acerbic sentiments of justice drawn from past miseries and tribulations are mingle therein, and give his polemics subversive appearances that make him profoundly hated by all those who eat tranquilly at the well-garnished trough. The inexplicable information drawn from mysterious sources give his articles a redoubtable range. If his blows are not bruising, they sting and flagellate in the most sensitive spots; the foreigner is denounced, threatened with expulsion: the mouth must be closed that dares brazenly to vomit the truth; the pen must be broken that spatters with ink the national glory of Dr. Albin!

  He stops, exhausted; he feels the need to draw breath, that he is not yet in a state to vanquish, and re-enters, for a few months, into silence and oblivion.

  Then he is haunted once again by the memory of Mariette.

  The journalist, X***, who was Rose’s last lover, whose amity he has sought, glad at least to hear talk of her, confides particularities to him that stimulate his regrets.

  Rose, several times surprised in tears, had never ceased to love a friend of the bad days who had abandoned her. X***, discouraged by that discovery, had made every effort to liberate her from an affection so scantly shared; perhaps that was even the reason for which the unfortunate debutante had so easily become disinterested in him.

  Dr. Iblan never wearies of hearing those confidences. That love of Mariette’s, recalled to him thus in fragments, astonishes him and intrigues him. In addition to the sentiment of gratitude that linked him to her, he senses that she had a secret attraction of which he can never know the cause. The perverse instincts that slumber in the depths of every individual are a very insufficient explanation, and their effusions are, in any case, generally chaste.

  His imagination wandering, he dreams about anterior lives in which, centuries ago, in other forms and other milieux, Mariette and he had met and loved one another. But it is at smiles of incredulity that those poetic metempsychoses stop.

  As for the sentimental reason that it would have been meritorious to lift up a fallen woman, he knows full well that it had no great weight in his enthusiasm. On the other hand, that amour did not have the grandeur and the intensity that constitute veritable passions; otherwise, he would not have experienced the reticences, the somersaults and the awakenings followed by abandonments.

  Perhaps there has only ever existed in him one sole absolute love: that of science and the truth. It is the only almost-plausible explanation that he can admit, for if the affection he felt for Mariette was real, it is also incontestable that it was incomplete and, so to speak, secondary.

  The journalist X***, having become his intimate friend, found him a scientific column in a major daily newspaper, with the express condition of not attacking the doctrines of Dr. Albin. That situation, and alkaloid extractions that he made for a large central pharmacy, permitted him to neglect his aleatory clientele.

  He was now waiting to accumulate to large sum that would allow him to publish his History of Alchemy and Chemistry from the Remotest Times to the Present Day. It was a brilliant synthesis of all known works and a critique of all anterior theories. The final volume of the encyclopedic work, Dynamic Chemistry, crowned it with the complete destruction of theories he had once invented. It was the final part that he wanted to give to the public first; the rest would follow thereafter.

  The idea that he could soon attain that goal had brought a little clam to his soul; he was allowing himself to live and had become less aggressive when a terrifying example inflicted further tortures upon him and gave birth to serious doubts about the value of his action.

  One of the journalists that he sometimes encountered in the editorial offices, an Alsatian with a Socratic head, a taciturn, bitter man whose lips only opened to distill acerbic and violent recriminations but whose pen, on the contrary, only dripped indulgent and timid appreciations, a disequilibrated mind in which dreams of revolt ended in acts of resignation, had summoned him in order to receive his care. The unfortunate, afflicted by an incurable disease, was on the brink of death. The secret sympathy that had led him to address himself to Dr. Iblan, pushed him to make him confidences.

  The Alsatian, the son of a protestant pastor, exercising the priestly profession himself to begin with, in the most honorable and favorable conditions, had suddenly taken it into his head to break with a situation to which he owed his only value and, delivered to his own resources, to come to Paris to earn his living there.

  The attempt, as could be judged by its denouement, had been woefully unsuccessful. From effort to effort and misery to misery, in spite of his intelligence, perseverance and determination, instead of the fortune and glory of which he had dreamed, he was going to die, a misunderstood philosopher, an obscure journalist, without even having been able to earn his bread every day. No one would accompany him to his final abode—unless, he added bitterly, someone hung a mutton-chop from his hearse in order that it might at least be followed by a dog.

  The similarities that existed between his own adventure and that of the unfortunate pastor tr
oubled the mind of Dr. Iblan profoundly. What a young and well-endowed man had attempted in vain, could he hope to accomplish at his age?

  He was cursing the hazard that had just added that example to so many other objects of discouragement when he learned, a few days later, that shares and bonds worth three hundred thousand francs had been found in the dead man’s lodgings.

  There had, therefore, been a deep hole, a frightful lacuna, in that mind; all of his pride had consisted of wanting to live by himself, in the material sense of the phrase. If he had been thirsty for glory, if he had inspired to the intellectual life, he could have profited from that money, which would have permitted him to do his work freely and tranquilly.

  That narrow logic born of the aberration of a doctrinaire mind, that pride draped in a mantle of poverty, thus had only vague similarities to his own case. All his misfortunes, on the contrary, had resulted from the loss of his money; if it had not been necessary for him to seek his daily bread; if he had those riches that the Alsatian had forbidden himself to touch, he would already have realized his projects!

  He meditated then on the deadly thoughtlessness of old. How had he not thought about procuring papers and renting a domicile in the name of Jacques Liban, of depositing funds in a bank that would have paid him interest? Doubtless because no accident of that kind, however slight, had ever happened to him. It was nevertheless true that he too had had his lacuna, his hole. Was it the only one?

  Had his entire project not been dubious?

  Had he not been the victim of a prideful caprice?

  Why could Dr. Albin not have destroyed his past work himself? Why had he allowed himself to be carried away by sentimental considerations?

  And something akin to vague regrets rose up in his soul; he thought about the life of glory, fortunate and honor, magnificent prey that he had left for the shadows. The past—which until then, although precise, had seemed, like dreams, to be born of the unreal—came closer to him and became more tangible.

  Chapter XXXI

  It was in that state of mind that he read an advertisement one day for a fête for the benefit of morally abandoned children. Several society ladies, among them Madame Larmezan, were to lend their collaboration to it.

  Love of music had been the point of contact that had once united them; it was on hearing her sing that he had thought of making her his wife, a marriage advantageous in every fashion.

  Since the day of his funeral comedy, he had carefully avoided encountering her; the few rare appearances in which he had glimpsed her vaguely had always been produced independently of his will. That extreme delicacy, pure of all coarse sentiment of curiosity, had never abandoned him.

  This time, however, because of the more frequent returns he was making to the past, an invincible desire to see and hear her again came to haunt him. The opportunity was favorable; she was appearing in public, he would be lost in the crowd; he could observe her at his ease, without fear of being indiscreet and revealing, by an involuntary expression of his gaze, that the woman had once belonged to him.

  He therefore bought a ticket and went to the Hôtel Continental.

  The sumptuous festival hall was beginning to fill up with aristocratic spectators. The glare of the chandeliers, the scintillation of adornments, the delicate odor of perfumes and flowers, the radiant modesty of young women, the blossoming charm of wives, the dazzling whiteness of semi-naked shoulders and marmoreal arms, the simultaneously simple and refined elegance, the tasteful dresses and the discreet tone of dinner jackets formed a distinguished and essentially Parisian ensemble.

  Involuntarily, the thousand soilings to which poverty and hazard had led him presented themselves comparatively to his mind; he chased them away like bad dreams. The world that was really his own he had before his eyes, and, not being one of those that contact could stain, he felt that he was as pure, as noble and as worthy of esteem as before.

  Placed in a position to have a good view of the artistes without himself being in view, he waited impatiently for the habanera arranged by Lacôme that Madame Larmezan was to sing. Was it loss of memory or the result of his past indifference? He could not retrace in an absolutely precise fashion the features of the face that he had been accustomed to seeing for such a long time.

  Now that he evoked the memory, Professor Albin’s widow appeared to him en bloc, such as she had been in her first youth, such as he had seen her on the day that he had believed that he loved her. How had he been able to rediscover that? She must be approaching forty today, but she was surely still beautiful, otherwise she would not have braved the limelight; did she not still mingle a little coquetry with her charitable works?

  The orchestra played the prelude; her turn had come. She entered on the arm of her cavalier, made an amiable bow and raised her head.

  He had all the difficulty in the world not to betray his emotion. Clad in Spanish style, with a short skirt and a mantilla on her head, Madame Larmezan strangely resembled Rose Gontran of the Folies Nouvelles.

  Without her nobility and the discretion of her gestures, without the pure intonations of her voice, without the chaste although amorous ingenuousness of her large dark eyes, the resemblance would have been disconcerting.

  He mastered himself, believing that he was the victim of a fortuitous similarity of costume, and started detailing all the features: the broad and uncovered forehead, the arched eyebrows, the slightly jutting chin, gave her, like the other, the almost masculine allure of certain daughters of Spain or Italy. Whether he liked it or not, and in spite of the shame of sorts that he felt in establishing the comparison, Madame Larmezan resembled the unfortunate Rose. The type was more refined, the expression more chaste and more distinguished, the determination less emphatic, but it was Mariette, Mariette idealized, Mariette without the corruption, without the stigmata, the Mariette he had seen in his dreams of redemption!

  He told himself in vain that he was a wretch to soil by such a comparison the chaste and noble spouse of old; his reason and his delicacy could not belie the evidence of his eyes.

  Frantic applause saluted the socialite artiste; the apparition had disappeared.

  Is that not, he thought, the key to the inexplicable attraction that linked me to Mariette? Was I not loving, indirectly, the confused memory of the person to whom I owed all my affection? Must those two individuals, one ideal, noble and pure, the other debased, wretched and perverse, not have completed one another, to enlighten my double existence with a veritable amour?

  In spite of the flagrant indelicacy of the comparison, the truth burst forth before his eyes, increasingly luminous and revelatory; the memories became precise, the points of resemblance multiplied; everything, including the sound of her voice, familiar gestures, justified the impression that had just struck his heart. Moreover, in spite of the difference in years, the face of the one, touched by time, and that of the other, marked by debauchery and distress, appeared to have the same age; the expression alone distinguished them.

  He left with his head on fire, his heart full of tumult, but without regret for having come. After all, why had he been so offended by that involuntary comparison? The two women that he had loved were doubtless only separated by a social injustice. One, left to herself, without guidance and support, deprived over everything, had slid into the mud; the other, surrounded by luxury and wellbeing, had remained pure. Would not Mariette, in her place, have done the same?

  Were not the natural instincts of one as worthy as those of the other? Poverty alone had created the difference and produced the evil; although Rousseau’s theory of primordial equality, taken in its absolute and general sense, was false, was it not true in many individual cases?

  Did he not know, fundamentally, the two individuals that the similarity had brought to light? The fortunate one had fallen to the share of Dr. Albin, whom she had cherished vaguely with the mediocre dose of love typical their milieu of circulation; the disinherited had become the companion of the unfortunate, and had loved
him far more. Why should he deny that love? Was it not born of his misfortune? Perhaps it had been necessary for him to experience real suffering in order to be capable and worthy of love?

  In any case, those two women were completed by one another. If Mariette, undone by hunger, had lacked nobility and chastity, the other, faded by a bourgeois education and a fortunate existence, had lacked abandonment and passion in his regard. An overly egotistical conception of life had separated them, but fundamentally, they had without any doubt been created to love one another, and if...

  He stopped, sensing that he was sliding down a dangerous slope.

  “Wretch, insensate,” he murmured. “There were a few moments when I perceived that I loved Mariette through the memory of my wife; am I now going to regret her through the memory of Mariette? That would be stupid and vain. I have, so to speak, disdained her when I was young, rich and glorious, when it was my right and duty to love her, and now that I’m an unknown, a stranger, almost an old man; because, thanks to the other, the blindfold that covered my eyes had just fallen away, would I dare to raise my eyes toward her? That would be to run toward a lamentable and humiliating disappointment!

  “By what entitlement could I reclaim and affection that I have voluntarily and legitimately lost?”

  But all these arguments did not succeed in chasing away the memories and regrets to which that transfiguration of sorts gave birth.

  A circumstance fortunate for his repose put him in the presence of Madame Larmezan again, a few weeks later.

  That day, the day of the dead, the crowds in mourning heading toward the cemeteries reminded him of his dead daughter, his Jeanne, whom he had loved so much but the memory of whom had almost been effaced in his heart.

  He reproached himself for that incomprehensible forgetfulness and resolved to take a few flowers to her grave.