It was the turn of Professor R***, the old master, to speak on behalf of the Académie de Médecine. The American doctor could not help smiling. Professor R*** had once been the most determined and disloyal enemy of the author of Biological Chemistry. His animosity had only been disarmed on the day of the funeral, when he had remained silent. Now he was about to speak; were his honeyed and emphatic tones finally about to distil some mortal poison enveloped in eulogies?
But Dr. R*** commenced a panegyric so pompous, pronounced in a tone so convincing, that Dr. Iblan, shaken by a nervous hilarity, was unable to stifle the burst of sardonic laughter that rose to his lips.
All heads turned toward him; all curious and irritated gazes were fixed upon him. The reporters hastily took notes, the members of the audience muttered to one another. The orator, nonplussed and as if ashamed to be caught in flagrante delicto in a lie, stopped dead. The president of the committee said a few words to him in a low voice; he turned toward the impudent interrupter.
“I know,” he cried, crimson with wrath, “that there are vagabonds devoid of name and fatherland, false scholars, envious unknowns, brazen charlatans, who want to contest and sully the glory of my friend of genius. I have read their odious attacks, and disgust has sickened me. These scornful individuals do not exist, they do not warrant the honor of an indignant response, but I am rightly astonished that one of them, after having had the indelicate audacity to insinuate himself among us, should permit himself to disturb my speech in a vulgar manner. Does he not understand that his presence here is a lack of respect for the illustrious audience and the supreme authority that presides over it, and insult to the dead man that we venerate, and a challenge to his family and his admirers—which is to say, to us?”
Unanimous cries of assent and frantic applause saluted the oratory outburst. Policemen in plain dress had approached the foreigner and demanded to see his invitation. It was not in his name, and they asked him to quit the place that he was occupying illicitly.
He stood up to obey the instruction, and a volley of insults and threats flagellated him from all directions. Before the outrage and the sarcasms, the pariah lost all his composure; anger and pride disturbed his reason. Should he allow himself to be expelled like a stupid intruder from a ceremony that, in reality, was being held in his honor? Certainly not. He would not go without serving them the truths that had been incessantly rising to his lips for an hour.
“That statue,” he roared, “it is not to Dr. Albin, either to his person or to his merit, it is to you, to your social organization, to your official science, to your mediocrity, that you have erected it!”
The protestations and epithets redoubled in fury, the rumor of the crowd added its instinctive growl; the word “foreigner” had been pronounced.
“Down with the spy! Down with the German!” cried students and bourgeois, at random. People coming down the steps surrounded him on all sides; agents of the Sûreté had seized him by the collar. The official personages were alarmed by the scandal. Professor R*** and Dr. Larmezan were bombarding him with gestures; the disorder reached its peak. The American chemist struggled and tried to continue to make himself heard...
“Shut up!” was shouted at him from all sides. “Get out! You have no right to speak!”
Then Dr. Iblan lost his head completely; mad with rage, he shoved away the people who were trying to drag him away.
“More than anyone here, I have the right to speak,” he howled, with all his might. “I’m Dr. Albin!”
A sudden relaxation was produced in all the ranks. The anger of the audience and the crowd changed into an enormous burst of laughter.
“He’s a madman! To Bicêtre! To Charenton!” cried all the voices.
He disappeared, dragged away by representatives of the public force, laughter and jeers saluting his departure. But one woman—Dr. Albin’s widow—had vanished.
Chapter XXXIII
In his narrow cell at Bicêtre, Dr. Albin thinks about the enormous imprudence that he had just committed.
First of all, he had been taken to a police station, where his qualities as an American journalist and physician had earned him a certain respect. In order not to be arrested for causing a scandal and insulting the foremost French authorities, he simulated stupidity and maintained an obstinate silence. Physicians have examined him in haste and sent him to Bicêtre. He has committed the act of a madman; therefore he is mad, or officially considered as such—which is, from the viewpoint of results, exactly the same thing.
That’s better, he thinks, than passing for a rational individual. I really don’t want the law to examine me too closely, I fear that more than science. But how am I going to get out of this?
He knows, in his capacity as a physician, that it is easier that it is easier to get in here than to get out. It is necessary, for the moment, that he resigns himself to being here for some time. Everything is so quickly forgotten in Paris! In a few weeks, no one will any longer remember the scandal he has caused; the longer he waits, the more chance he has of not being pursued.
He continues, therefore, to play his bewildered role, and then, little by little, pronounces a few words, manifests signs of intelligence, and is permitted to walk in the courtyard.
The majority of the lunatics who surround him scarcely interest him. He knows them; he studied them once; but a few among them impress him particularly because, in their obscure language, which he once found denuded of sense, he now glimpses profound ideas.
One of them, as soon as he saw him, has run toward him.
“Dr. Albin!” he cries. “How is the dear doctor?”
“You recognize me, then?” he replies.
“How could I not recognize one of the illustrious jokers that had me locked up here?”
“In what epoch, on what occasion?”
“About ten years ago. I wanted to get rid of a vampiric person who had stolen all my luck and whose glory was based on my discoveries.”
“And it’s Dr. Albin, you say, who had you interned here?”
“You know that very well, since it was you.”
“You’re mistaken, my friend. The illustrious joker, to use your expression, has been dead and buried for more than seven years. Perhaps I have some resemblance to him, but that’s all.”
The madman bursts out laughing. “If it’s me that you want to swallow such a lie, you’re wasting your time. Dr. Albin is you, unless”—he suddenly becomes serious and suspicious—“you’re his larva; but larva or objective being, you’re Dr. Albin.”
He could not help making an ironic reflection: only one person consents to recognize him, and that man is mad!
“What is your name?” he asked.
“Marcotte.”
He searched his memory and recalled that he once gave his advice in the case of a young astronomer culpable of an attempted murder. He judged it pointless to disabuse him.
“Well, yes,” he confessed, “I’m Dr. Albin, and you can see that I have no luck; after having had others locked up, now I’m locked up in my turn.”
“Bah! Might you, perhaps, have made some discovery of genius? I thought you had the means. Between ourselves, your biological chemistry brought nothing new; it’s a transposition. You transformed a mathematical operation, an algebraic operation, that’s all. You didn’t even suspect the radiant state of gases.”
“Genius, mediocre or stupid,” he replied, with a certain ill humor, “I’m your companion now.”
“Oh, I’m not mad; I’m submitting to the punishment of the bestial vice called anger, and that’s justice; I should have been able to master fatality by will. The stars incline, but don’t necessitate.”
“One can see that you’re an astronomer.”
“Astronomer, mathematician and astrologer, and it’s so universally admitted that astrologers ought to fall into a well that, when they don’t fall, they’re pushed.”
The poor devil recounted his story. He believed himself to be a victim of offici
al vampirism.
If, taken individually, false scholars are impotent, the force that results from their association is considerable. It is an aggregate that attracts all individuals of value, absorbs them, fashions them, and pours them into a mold of mediocrity. If a mind of genius resists them, they gang up against him; the collectivity is fattened at the expense of the individual, in order to take away his means.
It was to avenge himself on a man of renown, who was profiting from his work without wanting to acknowledge his merit, that, in a moment of exasperation, he had had recourse to crime.
The dialectic of the hermetic philosopher was tightly bound; furthermore, the new perceptions that he had in the sciences and the arts rendered his conversation infinitely interesting.
He had written a treatise on harmony based on the Pythagorean theory of numbers and a meteorography full of precious indications on the art of producing and directing atmospheric phenomena. Like the ancient thaumaturges, he manipulated the thunder and unleashed the tempest. In chemistry he admitted a mineral scale analogous to Darwin’s animal scale. He had obscure aphorisms whose revelation gave rise to profound thought, and it was not without profit that Dr. Iblan heard him announce that “Quaternary chemistry is Tertiary chemistry returned to unity by the radiant state.”
Another poor fellow, an erotomaniac, a former professor of Mathematics, whose companions in misfortune had nicknamed him Père Absolu, claimed to have discovered the Absolute.
“And I don’t sell it, like that rogue Wrinski,”29 he exclaimed. “I don’t make a secret of it; I unveil it to anyone who cares to listen to me. The mistake of science,” he declared, “is to have decreed that there are inferior organs and others that are superior; hence the error of philosophers and idealist scholars; they’ve always sought the absolute here”—he tapped his forehead—“but once again, the brain is a simple recorder, it only centralizes the complex acts of the organism. It’s a kind of bureaucracy; it’s necessary not to give it an importance it doesn’t have; it ought to administrate and not govern; to want address yourself to it alone in order to know the secret of creation is to want to be the victim of error infinitely. It’s thus that humans have created a God in their own image and an absolute at the height of their comprehension—which is to say, a relativity; and yet it exists, the Absolute, and is manifest. But it’s not here”—he struck his forehead again—“that it’s necessary to seek it, for I’ve found it, the Absolute, and it’s for that reason they’ve locked me up here.”
With a kind of fury, the unfortunate old man repeated: “I’ve found it. Everything is in everything; to know the secret of an organ is to know the Absolute, and that’s where it is, nowhere but here; it’s by this means alone that we can arrive at an understanding of it.”
The vulgar gesture that accompanied these final words and the laughter of the inmates, anticipating the amazement of the newcomers, interrupted the conversation.
A third, a meek and literate individual, the victim of poetic visions, thought he had lived for thousands of years, and recounted the marvels of his metempsychoses. He transported his listener to Egypt to Greece and from Chaldea to Rome, fought in the back-streets of Florence and groaned in the Piombi of Venice, with an extraordinary richness of imagery, a luxury of detail, local color and the picturesque.
On various occasions, people had tried to get him to write down his dreams; then, they were no more than incoherent and inconsequential words; an intern struck by the beauty of his tales had wanted to write them down, but the eloquent lips had immediately closed. Interrogated on that mutism he had replied, full of sorrow: “What I recount must not be written; it’s for having wanted to violate that order that I’m here.”
The neighborhood of these poor castaways, victims of their noble pursuits, saddened Dr. Iblan profoundly. The sojourn at Bicêtre became intolerable to him; he was afraid of submitted to contagion and sinking in his turn. He resolved to get out.
“Monsieur,” he said to the chief of service, who, in the capacity of a colleague, treated him with sympathetic regard. “I ought to make you a confession. You’ve been able to convince yourself by my words and actions that I’m entire sound of mind. This is the explanation of the scandal that bought me here. I have the bad habit, acquired abroad, of smoking a mixture of Indian hemp and opium. My friends had told me many a time, by way of a joke, that I resembled the illustrious Dr. Albin, whose scientific doctrines I have perhaps opposed a little too energetically. On the eve of the inauguration I have yielded to my baneful passion. There’s no need, is there, to explain to you the effects of hashish. It is, therefore, the cause of the temporary morbid state that procure me the honor of your acquaintance. I did not give you that explanation immediately, fearing pursuit and wanting to give the interested parties time to forget my ridiculous fit.”
The specialist, having, indeed observed no sign of mental alienation, referred the matter to the court. Several noted alienists were charged with examining him again. A new theory saw the light of day in his honor.
“All madmen are simulators,” affirmed the celebrated Z***, with reason. “Dr. Iblan has committed an undeniable act of madness; he is simulating reason, therefore he is mad.”
His smiling colleagues did not admire the syllogism, and concluded in favor of the foreigner. He thought that his ticket of release would be rapidly signed, but days and weeks passed and the chief of service always engaged him to be patient, making him understand by implication that a higher will than his own had intervened to oppose his liberation.
Dr. Iblan conceived an ever-increasing irritation. He feared than an order might suddenly arrive to transfer him to a provincial asylum, which would lead, in a short time, to definitive forgetfulness and then real madness and death.
The powerful man who was bolting the doors of the horrible gehenna where his mind would end up succumbing with so much obstinacy could not be anyone but Dr. Larmezan, Dr. Albin’s successor, the representative of the honor and interests of his family. He asked to make him a communication of the greatest importance. What was he risking? Clarify or conforming the doubts of his former pupil? Perhaps—but Dr. Larmezan was less disposed than anyone else to recognize him. He would keep to himself the suppositions that would result from their conversation, and the fear of seeing the specter of Dr. Albin reappear would submit him to the desire of Dr. Iblan.
The professor of biology, very intrigued, came to Bicêtre the next day and considered the author of the scandal with an anxious curiosity.
“It can’t be denied,” he murmured, striving to laugh, “that there’s a certain resemblance between you and my master. What do you have to say to me?”
The American repeated the explanation that he had already given, and told him the conclusion of the experts and the physician caring for him.
“I know all that,” he professor repeated. “Let’s get to the point. What do you want to confide to me, or what do you want from me?”
“For you to give the order to let me out of here.”
“Let you out of here!” exclaimed the professor, disappointed. “That’s not in my power, Monsieur. You ought, in any case, to reckon yourself fortunate to be here. The court, based on your declaration of smoking opium, wanted to send you to the petty sessions court; it’s to your quality as a physician that you owe the benefit of madness.” Doubtless making allusion to private conversations, he added: “Perhaps also, a little, to the bizarre resemblance that, in spite of your appearance of a Spanish-American, one can’t help noticing.”
“If the court had charged me as a responsible individual, I would get away with two or three months in prison or an expulsion order, whereas I’m here in the quality of a madman, which is far from being a benefit in my eyes. As it’s impossible for me to support the imprisonment and promiscuity to which I’m subjected any longer, it’s necessary, at any cost, that I get out. Please weigh the value of those words: at any cost.”
“I don’t understand,” declared Dr. Larmezan.<
br />
“Between us, any categorical explanation is impossible; I can and ought only to make myself understood in an uncertain fashion. If I spoke to you clearly, you would refuse energetically to understand me.”
“Ha ha!” sniggered Dr. Albin’s successor. “I knew full well that you weren’t cured.”
“Don’t oblige me to prove, in a definitive fashion, that I am not, and never have been, a madman. In spite of my repugnance, rather than suffer the slow agony of incarceration, I’d be capable of telling the truth.”
“Calm down, my poor friend, calm down,” exclaimed the professor, “and above all, shut up, because you’re about to claim once again that you’re Dr. Albin.”
“I shall refrain very carefully from doing that, or, if I emitted a similar pretention it would be with evidence to support it. But it’s not in that fashion that I shall justify the exclamation that brought me here. It would be by summoning the intervention of the man who permitted me to speak in his name: Dr. Albin himself.”
Dr. Larmezan’s hesitant laughter rang false. “Insensate words,” he proclaimed. “My illustrious master is dead and buried.”
“Are you certain that his veritable remains were taken to Père-Lachaise?”
“Alas.”
“Don’t pretend regrets that you’ve never had,” said the mysterious individual, “and don’t assert either a certainty that you have not had since the moment you measured scientifically the head that was sent to you from Tonkin.”
Dr. Larmezan was no longer laughing; he had gone strangely pale, and was considering fearfully the possessor of a secret that he had never revealed. He tried very rapidly to get a grip on himself. “And it’s with assertions of that sort that you intend to prove your cure?” he said.
“I can’t hold those words against you, for you alone can understand them; I shall therefore keep them to myself…if I get out of here; but it’s necessary that I get out of here.”
The Second Life of Doctor Albin Page 33