Doctor Lerne

by Maurice Renard

  “Many of them also recited: ‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.’

  “Would you believe it? I was almost saved by women! Whole crowds of them wanted to become men. Unfortunately, my blackguards, save for a couple of the most intrepid, categorically refused to adopt the female sex.

  “Despairing of my cause, I offered them the alluring perspective of indefinite life, renewing its vigor at each new incarnation. ‘Life,’ septuagenarians replied, ‘is already too long as God has set its limits. We no longer have any desire but to die.’

  “ ‘But I’ll restore all your desires at the same time as youth!’ I said. ‘Many thanks,’ they replied, ‘but the fate of desires is to be unsatisfied.’ I often heard adults reply: ‘The charm of acquired experience is worth preserving from any lessening, and its diminution should not be risked by naïve impetuosity and the temerity of adolescent blood.’

  “There were, nevertheless, a few would-be emulators of Faust ready to sign a pact of youth—but all those wary nabobs raised the same objection: the danger of the operation, the unreasonableness of risking life in the covetousness of life. You see, Nicolas, only young people on the point of death and conscious of their condition would unhesitatingly submit to the operation.

  “Having understood the necessity of overcoming the perceived danger, I was ready to undertake further studies—oh, greatly disillusioned, knowing thereafter how few clients I would have in the event of a second discovery, but also knowing that there would be enough of them to establish my fortune and my happiness—but they were postponed indefinitely.

  “I returned to Fonval, bitter and taciturn, with rage in my heart. Emma and Donovan could only encounter the most implacable of judges. I caught them; I took my revenge. You’ve guessed, haven’t you? Yesterday, the two MacBells took away Nelly’s brain, and Donovan’s soul resides in the Saint Bernard. The same punishment awaited the two of you for the same sin. Solomon could not have passed a better sentence, nor could Circe have executed it any more adeptly.

  “Well, nephew, I have been working hard and—in spite of your intrusion and the surveillance that I was forced to exercise over your actions—in a few days’ time, probably, I shall inaugurate the transfer of personalities without surgical intervention.

  “I was intelligent enough, you see, not to abandon vegetable grafting. I have taken all its developments much further, and that education, combined with my zoological experiments, constitutes an almost universal study of grafting. It’s the combination of that science with others that has revealed the probable solution to me. There can never be enough generalization, Nicolas! Besotted with specialization, parceling knowledge up into ever-more-minuscule subdivisions, we have a mania for analysis and we live with our eyes riveted to the microscope. In half of our investigations we should employ another method, revealing wholes: an instrument of optical synthesis, a synoptic telescope—or, if you prefer, a megaloscope.

  “I anticipate colossal discoveries…

  “And to think that without Emma, disdainful of finance, I would never have aimed so high! Love has fostered ambition, which fosters glory! By the way, you nearly put on the features of Professor Frédéric Lerne. Yes! She adores you with such a fine ardor, my lad, that I thought of dressing up in your appearance, in order to be loved in your stead! That would have been the best revenge, and was very tempting—but I still have need of my contemptible antiquity for some time yet. We’ll see about discarding that decrepitude later. Your captivating exterior will still be at my disposal, won’t it?”

  At these sarcastic words, I wept more copiously. My uncle affected commiseration, and continued.

  “Oh, I’m abusing your valor, my dear invalid. Get some rest. The satisfaction of your curiosity will, I hope, allow you a reparative slumber. Oh, I forgot! Don’t be alarmed about perceiving the external world otherwise than before. Among other novelties, things must seem as flat as a photograph. That’s because you can only look at the majority of objects with one eye at a time. Thus, one might say, playing with the terminology, that many animals are no more than doubly one-eyed; their sight is not stereoscopic. Other eyes, other visions; new eardrums, new sounds—and so on. It’s trivial. Among humans, every individual has his own way of perceiving things. Habit informs us, for example, that we should call a certain color ‘red’, so we do—but some who call it red receive an impression of green—that’s quite common-and others an impression of yellow-green38 or dark blue…

  “Well, goodnight!”

  No, my curiosity wasn’t satisfied at all—but I took account of that without being able to determine the points that my uncle had not elucidated, for an exaggerated unhappiness was overwhelming me with sadness. It was as if the Circean operation had left me impregnated with ether, the vapors of which were disturbing both my human understanding and my taurean heart.

  XI. In the Pasture

  During the week of my convalescence in the laboratory, bandaged, sedated and treated with various drugs, I was subject to the alternation of great sorrows: fits of despair followed by periods of exhaustion.

  After each interval of somnolence, I thought that I had dreamed the misadventure, Now, it’s important to note that the sensations of my awakenings confirmed me in this immediately-falsified error. It is, in fact, well known that amputees suffer a great deal of pain, and attribute that pain to the peripheral extremities of the severed nerves—that is to say, to the limb that is no longer there, and which they imagine they still have. The arm or leg that has been removed still hurts. If you consider that my entire body had been amputated, you will understand that I experienced pain in all its parts—my distant hands, my human feet—and that the pain in question seemed to me to be evidence of the continued possession of that of which I had been deprived.

  This phenomenon was gradually ameliorated, and disappeared. My misery did not decrease as quickly. Those who have amused their fellows with tales of similar farces—Homer, Ovid, Apuleius, Perrault—did not know what tragedies their fictions would become once realized. What a drama Lucian’s Ass is, deep down!39 What a martyrdom that week of starvation and forced inaction was for me! Dead to humankind, I awaited without courage the tortures of vivisection or the old age that would put an end to everything within five years.

  In spite of my misery, I healed. Having established that, Lerne had me placed in the pasture.

  Europa, Athor and Io gamboled around me. Ashamed as I am of it, honesty compels me to say that I found an unexpected gracefulness in them. They surrounded me amiably and, no matter what my soul did to repress it, a sovereign instinct—doubtless a property of my accursed spinal cord—infatuated me. But the heifers made off, probably astonished not to receive a response in some occult language, or frightened by some presentiment.

  Long days would not have sufficed for me to domesticate them, long days and all the guile that humans employ in that regard. A good kicking, in the end, subjugated them to my sovereignty. The incident would provide rich fodder for a philosopher, and I would definitely surrender myself to the joys of a digression if such awkward morsels did not break up the flow of a story with superb but inapt obstacles.

  At the time, in spite of the welcome the three horned ladies gave me, and only desirous of their commerce with valetudinarian ardor and stumbling technique, I set about grazing the meadow-grass peacefully.

  Then began a period of great interest: that of my observations of my new condition. It was so absorbing that I succeeded in considering the body of the bull as place that I was passing through in the course of a voyage: a station of exile, certainly, but an unexplored station full of surprises, from which hazard might perhaps extract me—for it is sufficient that a place be not unpleasant for one to envisage the risk of being expelled therefrom.

  For as long as that accommodation of my human mind within the body of the beast lasted, I was really quite happy. It was, in effect, as if an entirely new world had just been revealed to me, along with a taste for the herbs that I g
razed. Just as my eyes, ears and muzzle sent my brain unexpected visions, auditory sensations and olfactory indications, the exotic papillae of my tongue furnished me with wholly original gustatory sensations. The herbs released countless savors of which our human palates have no suspicion. Gourmet cuisine cannot offer as many pleasures in a dozen courses as a bull obtains from a square foot of meadow. I could not help comparing the taste of my forage with that of my former aliments. There is more difference between Lucerne and clover than between a fried sole and a haunch of venison with chasseur sauce. All kinds of spices season plants for a herbivore’s mouth: buttercups are a trifle bland, and thistles a little too peppery, but nothing equals the multiple scents of hay…

  Pastures are continuously-served feasts, to which perpetual hunger commits their gourmet guests.

  The water in the trough changed its taste according to the time and the weather, sometimes being acidic and sometimes salty or sweet, light in the morning and syrupy in the evening. I can’t describe the delights of drinking it, and I suspect that the late Olympians, in a vindictive and ironic will, while leaving men nothing but laughter, left other animals the rare privilege of tasting ambrosia in lawn-grass and drinking nectar from every spring.

  I was initiated into the delights of rumination, and I understood the seriously epicurean concentration that oxen affect during the activity of their four stomachs, while an entire pastoral symphony fills their nostrils with rural scents.

  By virtue of experimenting with my senses and testing my faculties I obtained strange impressions. The happiest memory that I retain is that of my muzzle, center of tactile sensation, subtle and infallible touchstone of good and unhealthy grain, advertiser of enemy presences, pilot and counselor: a sort of authoritarian and dogmatic consciousness, an oracle concise in approval and denial, never in default, always obeyed. It is a mystery why the god Jupiter, having adopted the form of a bull for the benefit of Princess Europa, was not more charmed by his muzzle than the rest of that rather disgusting rape…

  I was, at any rate, wise to make these observations without delay, for my deteriorating health robbed me of the calm of mind necessary to their clarity as well as the desire to continue them. I suffered the ravages of headaches, colds, toothaches…the whole series of indispositions typical of citizens of the 20th century. I grew thinner. I harbored dark thoughts. It was caused, firstly, by the predominance of the soul over the body that my uncle had mentioned, and secondly, by two incidents that occurred and which immediately aggravated my illness.

  After a period of absence—occasioned, I presumed, by an illness consequent to her great terror—Emma reappeared. Without emotion, I saw her at the windows of her apartment, then those of the ground floor, and then outside. She went out on the arm of the maid and walked around the grounds, avoiding the laboratory in which Lerne and his assistants were working tirelessly. I had expected her features to be less drawn, and her eyelids less red.

  She walked slowly, her complexion pale and her gaze fixed, displaying a hint of moonlight to the sun, and eyes that open in the dark. A pathetic widow, she showed off her rebellious love in mourning, and the fervor of her regret, in a rather noble fashion. So she loved me still and, not seeing me anymore, supposed my fate to be that which she attributed to Klotz—not that of MacBell, which she had, in any case, misunderstood. In her mind, I could only be dead or a fugitive. The truth was beyond her understanding!

  More piously with every passing day, I followed her progress for as long as I could. Separated from her by a thread of barbed wire, I attempted mimes and speeches—but Emma was afraid of the bull, of its pirouettes and its bellowing. She understood none of it, any more than I had understood Donovan’s canine machinations. Sometimes, when the intention of an overly human gesture made my quadruped mass totter, the young woman was amused by it…and I found myself staggering in order to see her smile.

  Thus, little by little, love reasserted its rights as a tormentor. It could not return without the escort of jealousy—and it was that jealousy, in the second place, that accelerated my decline. It was accompanied by an extraordinary sensation…

  Situated between the pasture and the pond was a hexagonal building: the summer-house; the ex-giant Briareus. In order to annoy me, Lerne lodged my former body there. I saw his assistants bring in some basic furniture, and then the creature…and from that day on he was always there, his face stuck to one of the windows, looking at my stupidly.

  His hair was growing again, his beard growing longer. Having become dim-witted and chubby, his flesh was bursting out of his clothes. His eyes—those almond eyes of which I had been so proud—were rounded out in a bovine fashion. The man with the bull’s brain assumed the expression I had remarked in Donovan, but even more bestial and less god-natured. My poor body had retained the habit of certain familiar gestures: an incorrigible tic made him shrug his shoulders from time to time, with the result that the miserable creature seemed to be mocking me through the windows of the summer-house. Often, he cried out in the twilight; my beautiful baritone voice broke out into long discordant clamors, the howls of a gorilla. Then, in the laboratory, MacBell howled with the throat of a sick dog, and an irresistible need to lament in unison made the Fonval basin resound with the echoes of a monstrous trio.

  Emma eventually noticed that the summer-house was inhabited. That day, she and Barbe were going alongside the pasture. As usual, I had accompanied them as far as a certain arbor through which the path led, and waited for them at the opening of the tunnel, where turtle-doves were cooing.

  They came out, only to come to an abrupt halt.

  Emma was transfigured. She had taken on an animated expression that I recognized: nostrils flared, half-closed eyelids fluttering, and bosom heaving. She squeezed Barbe’s arm. “Nicolas!” she murmured. “Nicolas!”

  “What do you mean?” said the servant.

  “There! There! Can’t you see?”

  And while the stifled laughter of the turtle-doves emerged from the foliage, Emma pointed out the creature behind the window of the summer-house to Barbe.

  Having made sure that they could not be seen from the laboratory, Emma made a few signs, and blew a few kisses. The creature had excellent reasons for not understanding them. He opened his round eyes wide let his lip droop, and made the external appearance that I missed so much into a perfect type-specimen of cretinism.

  “Mad!” said Emma. “Him too! Lerne has made him mad, like MacBell!”

  Then the kind-hearted girl sobbed with all her heart, and I felt anger rising within me.

  “Above all,” the servant told her, “don’t take it into your head to go near that summer-house—it’s visible from every direction.”

  The other shook her lovely tresses, dried her tears, and settled down on her belly in the grass, in the stance of a sphinx, with her head in her hands and her rump thrust upwards. Lovingly, she contemplated that young male body, from which her own had drawn so much pleasure. The brute seemed much more interested in that pose than her previous one.

  Such a scene exceeded the bounds of the grotesque and the horrible. That woman, infatuated with my form, in which I was no longer contained! That woman, whom I adored, lusting after a beast! How could I accept that with a tranquil mind? And I knew, from the history of MacBell, that Emma’s passions would not recoil from madness, and that my former body, being more athletic, would therefore please her even more!

  My wrath burst forth. It was the first time that I yielded to the domination of my violent flesh. Mad with rage, panting, snorting and foaming at the mouth, I ran through the meadow in every direction, ripping up the soil with my hooves and my horns, possessed by a murderous fury…

  From that moment on, hatred poisoned my dreams: a ferocious hatred against that supernatural brute, that stupid Minotaur who made Broceliande into a parody of Crete with his forest labyrinth! I cursed that body which had been stolen from me; I was jealous of it, and often, when Jupiter-Me and Me-Jupiter looked at one anothe
r, both prey to nostalgia for our cast-off clothing, the fury possessed me again. I charged back and forth, bellowing as if in a corrida, tail upright, nostrils fuming, head down, ready to commit murder and as desirous of doing so as for sex in springtime. The cows protected themselves as best they could; all the creatures in the grounds dreaded the raging bull. One day, Lerne, who happened to be passing that way, fled as fast as his legs could carry him.

  Life weighed heavily. I had exhausted all the pleasures of observation, and my new dwelling no longer caused me anything but distress and repugnance. I continued getting thinner. The forage lost its aroma, the spring became insipid and the company of the heifers became odious. On the other hand, old desires imposed themselves upon me in the guise of morbid whims: the desire to eat meat and…to smoke! Priceless isn’t it? But other considerations were no laughing matter. The dread of the laboratory made me tremble every time an assistant approached the pasture, and the fear of being tied up during the night prevented me from sleeping.

  That wasn’t all. I nursed the conviction that I would go mad in my ruminant’s skull. The fits of uncontrollable wrath would be the cause of it. They were becoming more frequent—and Emma’s conduct was not helping to make them any less frequent.

  In fact, the pretty walker prowled assiduously in the vicinity of the summer-house, and desire drew her toward the Minotaur. In truth, he had the appearance of a complete humanity at such moments, so similar to brutes does lust render us! Emma gazed complacently at that cruel face, none of whose features moved, in which the eyes glittered above inflamed cheeks: that abject expression which I had already observed in true men in the course of some debauchery, which would have sent an equivocal frisson through the wisest of virgins…