The Second Life of Doctor Albin

by Raoul Gineste

The law is satisfied, and society avenged.

  Chapter XXXIX

  In a corner of the nave that Danton, Marat and so many others once filled with their tumultuous eloquence, the laboratory of the practical school, more numerous than usual, the physicians and their pupils proceed actively with the preparations for the usual experiments. The piles, the electrical apparatus, and the instruments of transfusion are carefully checked, the defibrinated and oxygenated blood is maintained at the required temperature. They await with impatience the head and the body of the executed man, which the delegates of the Faculté will not take long to bring them.35

  Everything is finished. Clad in their white aprons, bare-headed or ornamented with black velvet skullcaps, leaning on the walls or sitting on the corners of tables, they smoke their cigarettes and chat familiarly among themselves.

  “What a pity,” exclaims Professor Larmezan, the head of the laboratory, “that the Ministry didn’t think it ought to accept the anarchist’s proposal! Think, Messieurs, of the immense advantages we might have obtained from a human vivisection; my illustrious predecessor and master would have been shivering with joy in his tomb. He always dreamed of finding an intelligent condemned man who would lend himself to it.”

  “And this one was of superior intelligence,” a young physiologist adds. “His proposal proves it; he would have been admirably submissive to all our experiments; today would have been a memorable date in the history of science.”

  “The Minister of Education,” affirms a surgeon, “wasn’t hostile to the idea, but his colleague in Justice laughed in his face, and the entire Council asked whether he was insane.”

  “Routine on one side and sentimentalism on the other,” observes a professor of the Collège de France. “What would the Anti-Vivisection League say?”

  “And the politicians? The government would have been hauled over the coals the next day. What fine speeches about the sacred laws of humanity! The religious sects would come together in a touching chorus. The Ministry wouldn’t survive for twenty-four hours.”

  “The same individuals who criticize us for ignorance,” the surgeon continues, “haggle over the means of instruction. They want to be delivered of all their ills, they demand that we spirit away their pains, and they reproach as a crime the death of a few rabbits that we sacrifice in order to cure them.”

  “Which doesn’t prevent them,” an intern remarks, “from killing the same rabbits themselves and devouring them without remorse.”

  “Let it be said between us,” puts in Dr. R***, a member of the Society for the Protection of Animals, “that some physiologists indulge in unnecessary and overly numerous vivisections; come on, Messieurs, when an experiment is conclusive, a definitive demonstration made, it isn’t necessary to repeat it hundreds and thousands of times.”

  “I’ll wager,” ripostes the Professor of the Collège de France, sharply, who believes that he is being criticized “that you’ve shot more birds hunting than I’ve killed guinea-pigs in my laboratory.”

  “I kill game in order to eat it.”

  “And I kill animals to instruct my pupils; on your side, the stomach to which you refuse nothing, on mine, the brain that you want to submit to the congruent portion. You’re going to object that you expedite your victims without making them suffer and I torture mine, but what about the crustaceans that you boil alive, the quails and capons you blind in order to cram them? As long as you don’t become a vegetarian, I won’t believe in the sincerity of your tenderness.”

  “People protest against useful vivisections,” adds a Limousin student, rolling his rs, “and cast fire and flames against bullfights, but no one seems to care that geese are plucked alive to make eiderdowns.”

  “And the hundreds of workers devoured by the manipulation of chemical products, the victims of phosphorus, mercury, acid, sulfur, carbon...”

  “You can say all that in the Chambre when you’re a député,” says Dr. Larmezan, smiling.

  “A human vivisection!” says the young physiologist. “But an immense clamor would rise up from all corners of the world. That men die uselessly on the scaffold, fine, but that a condemned man has the audacity to want to redeem his crime by a service that will do a thousand times more good than the evil he’s committed—stop there!”

  “Society is logical,” replies old Master L***. “It wants to punish a guilty man; it wants him to die on the shameful platform; it wants the example to impress the crowd. I don’t affirm that it’s right, but that is its goal. If it permitted its victim to serve for such experiments, that goal would not be attained; it would not be to shame that the guilty man would be led but to glory. Think of the renown of the man who would permit the penetration of the complex arcana of human thought. Imagine the right he would have to the gratitude of future generations—especially a man whose murder could pass for a political crime. His murder would be immediately pardoned! A century would not go by before his statue would be erected in a public square; streets would bear his name; cities would dispute the honor of having given birth to him.”

  “People prefer to reserve that glory to conquerors!” exclaims a pupil.

  “Don’t speak ill of conquerors, young man,” replies the old professor. “War is a just and necessary thing.”

  “Still a partisan of bleeding,” sniggers Dr. Gérot, a professor in the École de Pharmacie.

  “We’ll come back to it, my lad, we’ll come back to it; bleeding is preferable to the dirty drugs with which you teach students the art of poisoning their clients.”

  The conversation risks taking on a bitter tone; one member of the audience hastens to change the subject.

  “By the way, do you know who he is, the companion whose remains are about to be brought to us?”

  “Did you know him?”

  “No, but I read the debates. He’s the famous orderly at the hospital who made the femoral ligature that put poor G***’s nose out of joint.”

  Everyone bursts out laughing at the memory of that adventure.

  “Bah! That orderly who resembled Dr. Albin?”

  “The same.”

  Involuntarily, Dr. Larmezan frowns

  “It appears, too, that he was a former medical student.”

  “Hence the request for vivisection and the scientific terminology of his explanatory letter.”

  “Personally, if I’d been on the jury, I wouldn’t have condemned him to death. The man was surely a general paralytic36 with delusions of grandeur; his obstinacy in claiming that he wasn’t Jacques Bilan and that an illustrious individual was concealed beneath that borrowed identity was clear proof of it.”

  “Not so clearly as that. Perhaps he wasn’t Jacques Bilan. All the witness evidence was valueless, without exception. There was only one sole piece of evidence against him: the papers found in his possession. Now it’s quite possible, as he claimed, that he had bought them in London. Agencies exist that deal in that commerce; I know, pertinently, that more than one charlatan has passed his doctorate that way.”

  “And what about the anagrams? Was the advocate general mocked sufficiently on that subject?”

  “There was good reason,” declares the old master. “The law ought to be above such childishness. You can see from here the court of assizes condemning my friend Gérot to death because a vagabond named Goret cut an old lady to pieces after subjecting her to the utmost outrages.”

  The assembly guffaws loudly.

  “That would perhaps be less absurd than being obstinate in killing people by bleeding them!” exclaims Dr, Gérot, red with anger.

  “Come on, Messieurs, we’re not at the Académie,” remarks Professor Larmezan. “No vulgar words; preserve your forces—there’s a session tomorrow.”

  “It wasn’t me who started it,” murmurs the old master.

  “A mania of the sixteenth century, anagrams,” adds Dr. Larmezan. “This Jacques Bilan must be erudite.”

  “The question asked by a member of the jury wasn’t as negligible
as the President declared, since the anarchist had a mania for anagrams and claimed to be hiding under a pseudonym, it would have been interesting to research all the anagrams of Bilan.”

  “That’s quite easy,” proposes an intern, picking up a pencil and a piece of paper. “Bilan, you say? Let’s see: Nibal, Linan. Balin. Inbal, Iblan...”

  “Iblan, the American doctor!” voices exclaim on all sides. “What if it were him? It’s quite possible. The articles he published were anarchist.”

  “Hang on, I’ll continue: Linab, Blain, Lanib, Labin, Albin...”

  Professor Larmezan has great difficulty repressing a start of anger and fear.

  “Enough, Messieurs! No jokes in bad taste; let’s respect the memory of our illustrious deceased and not let his name by mingled with such infamies. Leave the anagrams alone. It’s already enough that that question of resemblance—which was real, I admit—has come into the discussion.”

  “So that orderly really did resemble my friend Albin?” asks Dr. R***, who is perhaps not sorry to annoy Larmezan.

  “Yes,” the latter replies. “Dr. Albin had a distinctive physiognomy, and yet, on three different occasions I’ve encountered people who resembled him closely. First that orderly…”

  “Who was jolly good at surgical operations.”

  “Well, Messieurs, physical resemblance is sometimes accompanied by similar mental and intellectual aptitudes. Then, on the day of my marriage, an unknown with the appearance of a petty clerk who watched us come out of the church.”

  “Banquo’s ghost!” murmurs the old master between his teeth.

  “And finally, the famous flashy foreigner whose name has just been cited, the author of the scandal on the day of the inauguration, that lunatic Dr. Iblan.”

  “Oh, that one didn’t resemble him at all.”

  “Make no mistake, Messieurs; beneath that Spanish-American appearance, he was the one who resembled him most closely. I saw him at close range at Bicêtre, and I’m not alone in having perceived that bizarre particularity. The ferocious enemy and stubborn detractor of Biological Chemistry, bore an astonishing resemblance to the author of that work of genius, and it was that singularity that had done him the bad turn of sending him to Bicêtre. He’d eaten hashish, and our savant friend Gérot will tell you that the effect of Indian hemp is to exaggerate ideas.”

  “Gérot has never eaten it, then,” declares the old partisan of bleeding, pursuing his friend like a dog after a rat. Dr. Gérot shrugs his shoulders.

  “And sometimes deforming them,” the professor of biology adds. “Dr. Iblan, who was aware of that resemblance, imagined himself to be Dr. Albin.”

  “Cases of resemblance are excessively common,” adds the old master, in a detached tone that announces nothing benevolent. “The human species can be divided into a small umber of characteristic types to which numerous categories of individuals are attached more or less closely. Without being a determined partisan of transformism, one can divine merely from the appearance of an individual the animal type to which his physiology attaches him. To cite only one example, it would be necessary to be blind not to recognize at first glance a perfect representation of the so-called equine type in the nobly accentuated features of my excellent comrade and fried Gérot.”

  A burst of laugher salutes the new gibe.

  “Asinus asinum fricat,37 you old gorilla,” replies the colleague, advancing menacingly.

  “Come on, Messieurs,” Dr. Larmezan interjects. “Get ready; I can hear noises on the stairs; the decapitated man is arriving.”

  The door opens; two physicians, followed by an amphitheater assistant, who is carrying a large basket, come in.

  “Here’s the head first,” says one of them. “The body’s downstairs.”

  “You’re very late.”

  “Is that our fault? It’s always the same rigmarole, as you know full well; they never finish with their formalities.”

  The head is brought out of the basket. It is enveloped in compresses, stained with blood and sawdust. It is wiped in haste, and placed on the table. The face is bloodless; the wide open eyes have conserved, as if staring, an energetic gaze; the corners of the lightly curled lips have a bitter smile.

  Everyone considers it with an astonishment mingled with stupor. No one dares say a word.

  “I recognize him!” cries Dr. R*** suddenly. “That’s the head of Dr. Iblan. The fellow was well worthy of such an end!”

  Professor Larmezan opens frightened eyes. “That’s quite possible,” he murmurs, after a moment of painful silence. He quickly recovers his composure. “Come on, Messieurs,” he says, “we’re wasting precious time. The identity of the corpse scarcely matters; let’s get to work.”

  The habitual experiments are rapidly executed. An intern armed with scalpels and a saw prepares to make the cranial section in order to determine whether the brain is undamaged and to what extent the guillotine can be considered as responsible.

  “Stop!” cries the professor of biology. “We’ll do the autopsy of the brain this afternoon. I’m late for my visits.”

  He hastens to send everyone away and he makes a false exit himself.

  Soon afterwards, however, the laboratory door opens noisily; the eminent professor, prey to the most vivid agitation, runs to his anthropometric instruments and makes minute measurements of the diameters and the facial angle of the severed head.

  As the operation progresses, incoherent words emerge from his mouth; emotion renders him breathless; a cold sweat pearls on his forehead.

  Then, thinking that no one can see him or hear him, the truth finally escapes from his trembling and blanched lips:

  “The head of Dr. Albin!”

  Notes

  1 Included in the collection Martyrs of Science, Black Coat Press, ISBN 978-1-61227-229-0.

  2 tr. as The Wing, Black Coat Press, ISBN 978-1-61227-053-1.

  3 tr. as “The Invisible Satyr” in Homo Deus, Black Coat Press, ISBN 978-1-61227-351-8.

  4 tr. as “Mimer’s Head” in The World Above the World, Black Coat Press, ISBN 978-1-61227-002-9.

  5 tr. as “Professor Bakermann’s Microbe” in The Supreme Progress, Black Coat Press, ISBN 978-1-935558-82-8.

  6 Although we are not told what Dr. Albin’s theory is, the hints dropped in this opening passage allow certain deductions. It is presumably a materialistic replacement for the theory of “vitalism”—the notion that living matter is essentially different from inert matter because it is possessed of a mysterious “vital spark”—which had been seemingly belied by the rapid development of organic chemistry in the second half of the 19th century. Albin’s crucial experiments might have indicated the necessity of reintroducing some such crucial energetic factor, conceived in a new way. The author might or might not have been aware in 1902 of the thesis of “élan vital” [vital impulse] that Henri Bergson was developing for eventual publication in Evolution créatrice (1907; tr. as Creative Evolution).

  7 The philosopher Pierre Azaïs (1766-1845), author of Des Compensations dans les destinées humaines [Compensations in Human Destiny] (1809), which attempts to prove that there is a necessary and strict balance between happiness and misery; not only is that notion very prominent in the present text, but so is one of the principal corollaries that Azaïs drew from it: that inequality is natural and inevitable, and leads inevitably to revolutionary fanaticism.

  8 The golden mean.

  9 The Confucian philosopher more usually known by the Latinized form of his name, Mencius. He was a great believer in the power of Destiny.

  10 The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1500-1558) did not literally feign his death, but did abdicate all the parts of his empire piece by piece.

  11 The Tonkin campaign, led by Admiral Amédée Courbet, began in June 1883, suggesting that the story opens in that year—a hypothesis eventually confirmed by calculations based on other data; it is unclear, therefore, why the author refrains from specifying the last two numbers when he cites dates in the
story.

  12 The Son Tay campaign, in which the French Expeditionary Corps eventually overwhelmed and smashed Liu Yongfu’s Chinese Black Flag Army, took place in December 1883. Although there is no evidence that the Black Flags routinely took heads as trophies, Liu Yongfu did offer a bounty for the heads of French officers, and much publicity was generated in Paris when the body of naval officer Henri Rivière, who was also a notable writer of imaginative fiction and whom Gineste might well have met at Le Chat Noir—which Rivière helped to decorate in 1881—was found beheaded in May 1883.

  13 Dr. Albin is quoting Napoléon Bonaparte, in an 1813 letter to General Lemarois.

  14 As in Molière’s Sganarelle ou le cocu imaginaire [Sganarelle; or, the Imaginary Cuckold] (1660)

  15 The quotation is from one of the epistles of the French theologian and poet Peter of Blois (c1130-c1210), whose name is rendered as Petrus Blesensis in Latin.

  16 It was in 1883 that Alphonse Bertillon persuaded the Parisian police to establish the anthropometric service, which routinely measured the supposedly-unique facial features of everyone arrested. Photographic “mug shots” were not added until 1888. Bertillon could not have been a former pupil of Dr. Albin’s, as he had had no real higher education and entered the Prefecture as a low-level clerk.

  17 The Mettray Penal Colony for children and adolescents—a pioneering installation of that kind.

  18 “Compère Guilleri” is a once popular song about a highway robber, which begins “There was a little man....”

  19 A sarcastic comment made by Nicholas Boileau, referring to the fact that Valentin Conrart (1603-1675), one of the founders of the Académie, who assembled some fifty volumes of letters, notes and other documents during his lifetime, which became an important historical resource after his death, never published anything while he was alive.