Doctor Lerne

by Maurice Renard

  Facing the laboratory, on the other side of the path, there was a wood. I sneaked into it, having made my battle-plan. In the middle of the wood there was an old friend of mine: a fir-tree whose radiating branches formed a spiral stairway. It overlooked the buildings; there could be no better-situated or more easily-accessible observatory. I had once played there, pretending to be a sailor among the yardarms.

  The tree offered me a perch, a trifle short but still bushy. On the higher branches, a memory awaited me, made of ropes and rotten planks: the cow’s-nest! Who would have thought that I, who had once pretended to discover continents and archipelagoes—so many plausible fantasies—from that vantage would one day be on the lookout there for sights as fabulously real?

  My gaze plunged downwards.

  As I’ve said, the laboratory consisted of a courtyard between two blocks. The one on the left was pierced y large bay windows on its ground floor and its single upper story. It appeared to me to be merely a superimposition of two vast rooms. I could only see the upper one, furnished with complicated apparatus: an apothecary’s cupboard, marble tables charged with flasks, bottles and retorts, open boxes full of shiny instruments, and two indescribable items, of glass and nickel-plated metal, whose appearance recalled nothing analogous, except perhaps—vaguely—the pedestal-mounted spheres on which waiters in taverns hang their napkins.

  The other block, too far away for me to be able to see into it, seemed from the outside to be an ordinary dwelling, evidently that of the three assistants—but what I had taken for a farmyard on the day of my arrival captured all of my attention.

  A wretched farmyard! Its walls were equipped with cages of various sizes piled one atop another up to a man’s height. In these cages, each surmounted by a label, rabbits, guinea-pigs, rats, cats and other animals that I could not identify because they were too far away were moving plaintively back and forth or lying down half-hidden beneath the straw. One such layer of straw was agitated, but I could not see the cause—a nest of mice, I presumed.

  The last enclosure on the right served as a henhouse. Contrary to custom, the poultry were locked up there. The whole scene was mute and melancholy. Four hens and a cockerel of a common sort were, however, more lively and alert, cackling as they strutted around the concrete floor, pecking at it obstinately, trying to discover grain or worms there, but in vain.

  In the middle of the yard, a grating inscribed a large square. In front of their lined-up kennels, philosophers both cynic and peripatetic, resigned dogs paced back and forth: frightful traveling salesmen’s poodles, poachers’ mongrels, concierges’ watch-dogs and pimps’ lap-dogs, degenerate mutts and bastard lurchers; in brief, an entire pack of curs, good for nothing but fidelity. They were roaming around, thus completing the courtyard’s resemblance to the playground of a veterinary hospital.

  It was at this point that things took on a more sinister appearance. Of all these beasts, I fact, very few seemed to be healthy. The majority sported bandages, whether on their backs, around their necks, on the napes of their necks, or—most frequently—on their heads. There were hardly any to be seen through the wire-netting of their cells that did not have pieces of white linen rolled into bonnets, cowls or turbans. And the procession of miserable dogs, comically coiffed in linen like tuaregs or abbesses, with labels dangling from their necks, formed a masquerade of the most funereal kind. It seemed that nearly all of them were lame; one of them fell on its muzzle at every step; another was limping; a third was shaking with a senile palsy. One stumbling mastiff, whining without any perceptible reason, suddenly unleashed a long howl, of the sort that people call deathly.

  Nelly was not there.

  I noticed a silent aviary in a shadowed corner, devoid of fluttering. As far as I could make out, the birds belonged to the most commonplace families; sparrows were swarming there. Even so, the majority belonged to a white-headed variety that my knowledge of ornithology did not permit me to recognize at such an altitude.

  An odor of phenol rose up to meet me.

  Ah! Lovely farmyards fragranced by dungheaps, the cooing of pigeons on the tops of mossy tiled roofs, cock-a-doodle-dos, the yapping of a dog tugging at its chain, squadrons of geese charging back and forth without rhyme or reason with their wings outspread…I thought of you as I confronted that infirmary. A miserable farmyard indeed, with its discipline and its invalids, labeled like the plants in the greenhouse!

  Suddenly, there was a stir. The dogs went back into their kennels and the poultry sought refuge beneath a stone rough. Nothing moved any longer; the aviary and the cages seemed to contain stuffed animals.

  Karl, the German with the Kaiseresque moustache, had emerged from the building on the left. He opened one of the cages, reached out for the bundle of fur huddled within it, grabbed it and drew out a monkey. The animal—a chimpanzee—struggled. The assistant dragged it away and disappeared with it the way he had come.

  A mastiff uttered a long howl.

  There was a commotion in the room with the apparatus then, and I saw that the three laboratory assistants were just coming into it. One stretched out the monkey, which was now bound, on a narrow table, and tied it down firmly. Wilhelm thrust something under its nose. Karl pricked the chimpanzee’s side with a morphine syringe. Then the tall old man, Johann, approached. He adjusted his gold-rimmed spectacles with a hand that was holding a scalpel and bent over the patient. I cannot explain the rapidity of the operation, but in no time at all, the chimpanzee’s face was no more than a shapeless red mass.

  I turned away, seized by a nauseating malaise: the vertigo of blood.

  What I had behind me, then, was a vivisection laboratory: one of those terrifying institutions in which philanthropy tortures brave and healthy animals in the hope of curing a few more sick people. Science there assumes a highly contestable right, which, in confrontation with the drama of bloodshed, seems impossible to sustain—for, if the executioner of a guinea-pig is assured of always torturing innocence, and often blissful happiness, the savior of a man, ten times out of twelve, can only delay the death of a guttersnipe or a wretch. In addition, to devote one’s existence to vivisection is almost equivalent to supporting oneself by eating living creatures. One can claim otherwise when one is chatting by the fireside, but not from a critical position like mine, in the very presence of the horrible thing and in the midst of tenebrous perils—which might, perhaps, involve it.

  I could not redirect my rebellious eyes toward that thing, in spite of all that it might possibly have told me. My gaze would not quit the trunk of the fir-tree, nor the red insect with a shield-like carapace dotted with black that blazoned its bark, providing it with a small and incorrect coat-of-arms with fifteen sable points strewn on a crimson field.

  Finally, I turned back—too late. The sunlight struck the windows, and their gleam obstructed my vision.

  In the courtyard, however, the dogs had left their kennels, and Donovan MacBell’s bitch, Nelly, was now walking among them. She was coughing. Her threadbare fur was no longer reminiscent of the beautiful fleece of a Saint Bernard. The superb hound was no more than a large carcass, whose thinness contrasted with the relative plumpness of her companions. Nelly too bore a bandage on the nape of her neck. What scheme had Lerne been able to hatch to make her suffer since the night of their altercation? What diabolical invention had he tested on her?

  The bitch seemed to be reflecting, so distressed was her appearance. She kept herself apart from the other dogs. When a certain rather fragrant bulldog accosted her, with lewd eyes and a tail declaring his intent, the bitch leapt up, accompanying the gesture with a gaze of such ferocity and a hoarse cry so terrible that the other retreated to the back of his kennel, while the pack raised their carnivalesque heads in alarm.

  The bashful Nelly continued on her way.

  What was I still doing there? In spite of my haste to cut that reconnaissance short and hurry on to other pastimes, something held me back…something inexplicable in the behavior of the bit
ch, which I could not quite make out.

  At that moment, a quickstep played by the Grey-l’Abbaye band reached Fonval on the wings of the wind. My fingers spontaneously tapped out the beat on the branches of my observation-post, and I perceived that Nelly had accelerated her progress. She was moving in step, following the rhythm of the tune.

  I remembered that Emma had made allusion to dog-tricks with reference to the bitch. Was this a circus routine that MacBell had taught his Saint Bernard? It did not seem to me that such a “turn” was performable in the absence of a trainer, or that an auditory sensation could provoke in an animal those mechanical movements that have always been our prerogative, resulting from habits more complex than those of instinct.

  The music faded away as the wind eased. The bitch sat down, looked up—and saw me. Damn! She was about to bark, to raise the alarm!

  Not at all. She looked at me with neither fear nor anger, with an expression that I shall remember forever. Then, shaking her huge shaggy head, she began to moan softly, very softly, her paw moving in a gesturing manner. Then she resumed her walk, still murmuring and darting furtive glances, as if she had wanted to make herself understood without attracting the attention of the Germans. Obviously, this is a mere manner of description, but all the same, one might have imagined that the bitch wanted to talk, so varied were the inflections of her modulated plaint. She was almost emitting the rudiments of a long guttural sentence, uniform and confused, in which the syllables “aicboul, aicboul” recurred incessantly. The whole thing sounded like an extended gargle…rather like badly-pronounced English words.

  The entrance on stage of the three laboratory assistants interrupted the phenomenon. They went across the courtyard, and all the dogs, with Nelly in the lead, headed for shelter. As he passed the fence of the kennels, Wilhelm threw over a piece of skinned but hairy meat, to which the monkey’s body was attached. It fell heavily; it was dead. The Germans went into the block on the right, whose chimney immediately started smoking.

  Then, one by one, the dogs came to sniff the chimpanzee. The bulldog was the first to bite into it, and the whole pack immediately joined in, snarling threateningly and voraciously. The cripples’ muzzles grew red, and their spiteful fangs tore that pitiful caricature of a child’s corpse to pieces. Only Nelly, her paws crossed in the doorway of her kennel, disdained the feast, gazing at me with lovely profound eyes. I realized that I had discovered the reason for her thinness.

  A window opened above all that, through which I perceived a dining-table fully set for three. The assistants sat down to a meal facing my wood; it was high time for me to leave.

  Then, I made an unpardonable blunder. I should have set forth to investigate the old shoe—that’s elementary. It seemed to me, falsely, that I had made supreme concessions to prudence, and that an elastic-sided shoe had every right to be considered nothing more than an elastic-sided shoe and not as a buried man, or even a buried leg. To a warm heart, at the end of the day, a beautiful girl certainly holds sway over all the footwear in the world—so, fortified by these reasons, with which I duped myself, it was toward the château that I went.

  My Aunt Lidivine’s room was now a store-room. One might have taken it for a courtesan’s dressing-room. Several wicker-work mannequins, clad in extremely elegant costumes, formed a gathering of armless and decapitated coquettes. The mantelpiece and side-tables were a milliner’s display-cases, in which feathers and ribbons concoct those minuscule or vast assemblies that only turn into pretty hats once they are on someone’s head. A battalion of dress-shoes embellished shoe-trees, and a thousand feminine baubles were heaped up everywhere, in the midst of a delicate and depraved scent—which was Emma’s.

  My poor dear aunt, I would have preferred that your bedroom was further profaned, and that it was Mademoiselle Bourdichet’s own bedroom, rather than hearing laughter from the next one—your husband’s—for that left me with no illusions.

  When I appeared, Emma and Barbe were stupefied. The young woman understood immediately, and burst out laughing. She was having lunch in bed. With a flick of the wrist, she twisted the flame of her hair into the coiffure of a bacchante. In that movement, I saw the shadow of her entire arm through her sleeve, and her chemise fell open. She made no attempt to close it again.

  A table loaded with plates and carafes had been pushed up against the bed. Barbe, who was serving her mistress, was cutting marmoreal slices from a ham. My first thought was that Barbe and the table were going to be a considerable hindrance.

  I gazed at the white throat—modeled it seemed, by a double caress—where a hint of pink was beginning to show next to the lace.

  “What about Lerne?” Emma said.

  I reassured her. He would not come back before 5 p.m.; I guaranteed it.

  She made that slight cluck that is the sob of joy, and Barbe, who was obviously very devoted, cheered up with such jubilation that her entire body partook of it, each of her bosoms heaving with laughter on its own account in the general hilarity.

  It was 12:30 p.m. We had four hours at our disposal. I suggested that time was short…but Emma said: “Would you like to have lunch with me, you rascal?”

  I had nothing better to do for the moment, because of Barbe and the table, so I sat down facing the young lady. “As you wish—but quickly, then!” I said, in a prayerful tone.

  She took a drink. Her vague murmur of acquiescence was stifled by the glass into a comic groan and her eyes peeped slyly over the crystal rim. She served me with her pale hands, the nails of which were painted.

  My wit and appetite were both lacking. Nothing could emerge from my mouth any more than penetrate it. Eros was strangling me.

  Emma! We measured one another with our eyes. In hers there were a great many promises and not a little irony. She was eating asparagus, making a noise like gluttonous kisses. Sometimes, when she leaned toward me, her chemise opened further, and the vision was then so prodigiously stimulating that it invaded my entire being through my pupils and gave my hands a sensation of softness…

  “Emma…”

  But she had already straightened up, almost nude, laughing at her own beauty as if at some great stroke of luck—and never, surely, had the infallible art of instinct made the most of such perfect plenitude and exact freshness with so much genius.

  I was definitely not hungry, and nothing passed my lips; I settled for contemplating Emma without further persistence. She was in no hurry, teasing me—deliberately, I assume—in order to excite my desire to frenzy.

  She ate her light meal in an Epicurean spirit. I had not yet seen her at ease. The act she put on in the perfumed warmth of the bedroom was, in my opinion, singularly accomplished, and the trailer gave birth to an irresistible desire for the full performance. I diverted myself by supposing the invisible from the visible, according to the secret relationship that charms that are made public are said to bear to those that are held in reserve. Emma’s nose was a highly expressive little individual, and her narrow mouth had red fleshy lips whose very silence—a silence of tremors, smiles and moues—was lively speech…

  She stretched herself. The batiste molded her contours, judiciously slender or appropriately curvaceous, and two points—one of which escaped as if it were a ruby star suddenly lighting up in a dazzling sky, astonished to find itself there.

  My involuntary start shook the table. A strawberry rolled into the milk-bowl.

  “Take all this and go away, Barbe!” said Emma.

  When the servant had gone she curled up under the bedclothes as if sensitive to the cold. She wore the expression of someone who has just heard good news.

  And for the moment that followed, a priapic god would have given his eternal life…

  Afterwards, Emma remained inert for longer than normal. Her stiff body was embellished by a disquieting pallor, and I could not unclench her mouth in order to make her drink a little water.

  I was about to call for help when a brief convulsion shook her. She released a sigh, both
soft and hoarse, opened her eyes and sighed again, but with more coaxing grace. Her mind seemed still to be far away; she was looking at me from afar, from lost Cytherean shores from which she was returning slowly.

  Suddenly bashful, I rearranged the bedclothes over her perfect nakedness—more naked and more perfect than any other—because, fateful and fastidious echoes of the tresses that determine, in collaboration with them, an inevitable diamond shape, the three previously-glimpsed reflections, previously seen as somber gleams, were no longer inflamed.

  Emma twisted a wisp of hair overhanging her forehead into a curl. She became animated again…she wanted to talk. The statue of ice and fire was about to come back to life and conclude the adorable act, the act of acts, with an adorable word…

  And she said: “Just as long as the old man don’t find out—that’s all we have to do, ain’t it, darling?”

  VII. Thus Spake Mademoiselle Bourdichet

  That sentence was a great disappointment to me.

  A few minutes earlier, I wouldn’t even have noticed it. On the one hand, its author had committed many other vulgarities, and on the other, I knew that the dread she manifested that my uncle might discover our transgression was ill-founded—but the time of satiation is that of virtue and good manners, remorse and anxiety.

  However, according to the custom of such encounters, we each contemplated one another’s respective physiognomies. They were in conformity with the rules in force for many millennia, hers imprinted with a rather irrational gratitude, mine denoting the most ridiculous pride.