Doctor Lerne

by Maurice Renard

  Dear Nicola,

  Forgive me for the payn but Must better that we part, I found my first Love, who I fought for with Léoni, Alcide. Hes the hansome man was winner yesterday. I gowith cos I done him wrong. Definate cant quit that life but for enormamous money, like lerne Promise. And then Idve made you unappy And then Idve cheated on you, for you see you only mad me fly twice, first when the bull fetch you one in the neck with its horn in the little wood, And then the time you ran away after, in my room, the Rest was not the same. I wanta realman. Isnt your fault, anI hope it wont cause you payn.

  Gooby forever.

  Emma Bourdichet44

  Confronted with a categorical indication on this point, formulated in a language almost as barbarous as that of legal jargon, there was nothing to be done but concede defeat. In any case, were nor the sentiments of which Emma was giving evidence exactly those that had attracted me to her? Had I not loved, above all else, that great thirst for love-making, the cause of her bewitching beauty and the reason for her infidelity?

  I had the strength and the wisdom to put off the rest of my reflections until the following day. They would only have drawn me to weakness. I enquired about the first train to Paris, and sent for a mechanic who might take responsibility for driving my eighty horse-power, or, if you prefer, Klotz-automobile. I was soon notified of the man’s arrival; we went to the garage together.

  The car had disappeared.

  As you will imagine, I did not hesitate to link the two defections together and suspect Emma of a secret complicity, but the hotel manager, believing that it was the work of daring thieves, went to the police station. He returned with the news that an automobile bearing the number 234-XY had been found in a suburban side-street, abandoned—according to him—by thieves for lack of oil; the reservoir had run dry.

  Of course! I said to myself. Klotz has tried to run away. He didn’t reckon on the exhaustion of the oil, and is now paralyzed!

  I kept the true version of the incident to myself and instructed the mechanic to push the car to the train, without trying to start the engine. “Promise me,” I insisted. “It’s very important. It’s time for my train—I must rush. Go—and above all, don’t replace the oil!”

  XVI. The Enchanter Dies Conclusively

  And now, here I am in this house in the Avenue Victor Hugo, rented for Emma. But I’m alone with my strange memories, since she preferred to sacrifice her intoxicating and lucrative beauty to Monsieur Alcide. Let’s not mention that again.

  It’s the beginning of February. The fire is burning behind me, crackling like a flapping flag. Since my return to Paris, having no work to do and no inclination to read, I’ve been writing the narrative of my singular adventures every evening and morning on this round table.

  Are they finished?

  The Klotz-automobile is here, in the coach-house, in a box that I had specially constructed for it. In spite of my instructions, the mechanic from Nanthel replaced the oil, and my new chauffeur and I have had all the difficulty in the world in bringing the human car here, for it has been impossible for us to turn the stopcocks to drain the reservoirs. He began by destroying his replacement, a 20-horse-power machine, the latest model.

  What could I do with the accursed Klotz? Sell him, and expose my peers to his malignity? That would be a crime. Destroy him, killing the professor in his final transformation? That would be murder. So I imprisoned him. The box has high walls of oak and the door is securely bolted.

  At first, the new beast spent his nights blaring out his dolorous and menacing scales, and the neighbors complained. Then I had the delinquent horn dismantled, in my presence. It was extraordinarily difficult to remove the screws and bolts, and we observed that the apparatus had, so to speak, welded itself to the car. We had to rip it out, which made the entire machine shiver. A sort of yellow liquid, with the odor of gasoline, spurted from the wound and leaked in droplets from the amputated section. I concluded from this that the metal has reorganized itself under the influence of the infused life—hence my fruitless efforts to fit a new spring on to the wheel, that operation now being a sort of animal graft, as impractical as the transplantation of a wooden finger on to a living hand.

  Deprived of his oral apparatus, my prisoner nevertheless continued his nocturnal racket for a week, launching himself at the door like a battering ram. Then, abruptly, he fell silent. It’s been nearly a month now. I think the gas tank and the oil reservoir are empty. Even so, I’ve forbidden Louis, my mechanic, to enter the ferocious animal’s cage I order to make certain of it.

  We’re at peace now, but Klotz is still there.

  Louis has put an end to the philosophical considerations that were ready to escape from my pen. He’s just arrived precipitately, and said me, with his eyes wide: “Monsieur! Monsieur! Come and look at the 80 horse-power!”

  I didn’t ask him anything else, but went out at top speed.

  On the stairway, the servant confessed to me that he had taken it upon himself to open the garage door because a bad smell had been coming from it for some time. Indeed, even the atmosphere in the courtyard was nauseating. Almost admiringly, Lois said: “Tell me whether that’s nice, Monsieur!” And he ushered me into the box.

  The car presented such a bizarre appearance that I did not recognize it at first.

  Sunk in a heap on its softened wheels, it was deformed as if it were a half-melted automobile made of wax. The levers were limp, curved like rubber bars. The shapeless headlights seemed to be deflated and their blue sticky lenses resembled the leucomas on dead eyes. I saw suspicious stains eating into the aluminum, and holes corroded in the iron. The steel, having become porous, was crumbling, and the copper had taken on the spongy consistency of a mushroom. Finally, the majority of its parts were marbled by reddish or greenish leprosies, which were neither rust nor verdigris.

  One the ground, the vile compost-heap was surrounded by a disgusting syrupy pool that had gushed out of it, gleaming with a murky iridescence. Strange chemical reactions were causing heavy bubbles to burst from time to time from that putrefying metal flesh and there was an intermittent flatulence gurgling in the mechanism’s interior.

  Suddenly, falling dully like cow-dung into mud, the steering-wheel collapsed, smashing the chassis and, by reaction, the hood. An unspeakable broth was seething there, and the horrid stench of organic decomposition made me recoil—but I had had the time to observe, in the depths of the shadow, the swarming of grave-worms.

  “What lousy workmanship!” declared the mechanic.

  I tried to make him believe that jolting sometimes dissociates metal, and can cause such molecular modifications therein. He did not appear to lend much credence to my assertions. In order to understand and accept it, knowing the even more incredible truth, I have been forced to satisfy myself by putting it into precise verbal form internally, in order to affirm and explain things in the same way that a mathematical problem in worked out by means of precise figures.

  Klotz is dead. The automobile is dead—and the beautiful theory of an animalized mechanism, immortal by virtue of the replacements of its parts and infinitely perfectible, has died with its author. The gift of life is, at the same time, the gift of death, which is its implacable sequel; and to render inorganic objects organic is to condemn them to a more or less imminent disorganization.

  Contrary to my expectation, however, the fantastic creature did not die for lack of gasoline, exsanguinated. No—the tanks were half-full. It is therefore, the soul that has killed it—the human soul, that corrupting soul which so rapidly wears out animal constitutions healthier than our own, and had rapidly reached a reckoning with that pure metallic body.

  I’ve given orders for the disgusting heap of refuse to be thrown away. The sewers will be Klotz’s tomb. He’s dead! I’m rid of him. He’s irredeemably dead…finally DEAD! His spirit is with those of the dead.

  He can no longer hurt me. Ha ha ha! DEAD! The filthy beast!

  I should be happy, but I’m not.
Oh, it’s not because of Emma! The silly little girl certainly caused me “payn” but that will fade away, and to admit that a grief is consolable is to be consoled already. My unhappiness comes from memories. It’s what I’ve seen and felt that torments me: the madman, Nelly, the operation, the Minotaur, Me-Jupiter, and so many other horrors! I dread eyes that stare at me, and I lower my eyes in the presence of keyholes…that’s the source of my misery.

  But I’m also fearful of a terrible possibility…

  What if it isn’t over? What if Klotz’s death isn’t the end of the story?

  I don’t care about him, since he no longer exists; even when he comes to torment me wearing Lerne’s face or that of a phantom car, I know that it’s probably only a dream or a hallucination of my feeble eyes. He’s dead, and I repeat that he doesn’t worry me at all.

  It’s the three assistants that worry me. Where are they, and what are they doing? That’s the question. They have the Circean formula, and must be making use of it for their own benefit to traffic in personalities. In spite of his defeat, Klotz-Lerne had met several people willing to submit to his surgical witchcraft and barter their souls for someone else’s. Every day, the three Germans must be increasing the number of these wretches, desirous of money, youth or health. There are men and women in the world who are, unsuspected by others, not themselves.

  I can no longer be sure of anything. Faces seem to me to be masks. Perhaps I should have noticed it before, but there are certain people whose physiognomy reflects a soul opposite to their own. Others, virtuous and honest, offer glimpses of unprecedented vices and unexpected passions, as frightening as prodigies. Do they have the same souls today as they had yesterday?

  Sometimes, a strange gleam comes into the eyes of someone to whom I’m talking, an idea that isn’t his; he will soon retract it, if he has expressed it, and he’ll be the first to be astonished that he was able to think it. I know people whose opinions vary from one day to the next—and that’s quite illogical.

  Finally, something imperious often invades me, a brutal ascendancy forcing me back within myself, so to speak, enjoining my nerves and persuading my muscles to reprehensible actions or regrettable words for the duration of a slap in the face or a curse.

  I know, I know; everyone experiences these thoughtless impulses and always has—but the reason for them is becoming increasingly obscure and mysterious to me. Just as they cite calculation, hypocrisy or diplomacy as the causes of custom and etiquette, people cite fever, anger or stupidity as the causes of the sudden revelations whose frequency I have observed among my peers, and which are, they say, only the lack of those greater things, or rebellions against them.

  Might not the science of an enchanter be the real instigator?

  Evidently, the mental state I’m in is exhausting me, and requires soothing. Now, it’s maintained by my obsession with my sinister sojourn in Fonval. That’s why, after my return, having clearly understood the necessity of losing the memory of it, I set out to write it all down—not, great gods, with the ambition of writing a book, but in the hope that, one it’s on paper, it will be less in my head, and that putting it outside will be sufficient to get rid of it.

  That’s not the case. Far from it. I have on the contrary, brought it more vividly back to life as I have recounted it, and some mysterious magical compulsion has occasionally obliged me to write a word or a sentence contrary to my intention.

  I’ve failed in my intention. I have to force myself to forget the nightmare, by getting rid of anything, however trifling, that is capable of reminding me of it. Soon, various items will be annihilated. Certain overly intelligent calves might be born in the vicinity of Fonval; Io, Europa and Athor must be bought back and slaughtered. Fonval and all its furniture must be sold. I must live! Live by myself, no matter how ridiculous or stupid a person I might be, but original, independent, uninfluenced and free—oh, free of memories!

  These abominations, I swear, are passing through my brain for the last time. I’m only writing that down in order to swear it more solemnly.

  And you, felonious manuscript! You, Doctor Lerne, which perpetuates beings and facts whose existence I shall henceforth refuse to admit—to the fire with you! To the fire! To the fire! To the fire!

  May 1906-May 1907.

  SCIENTIFIC MARVEL FICTION AND ITS EFFECT ON THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF PROGRESS

  Scientific marvel fiction45 is relevant to numerous philosophical questions, and the procedures of experimental logic dear to the Spectateur find a very effective application in its examination, as well as irrefutable evidence of their necessity and value. It does not seem out of place, therefore, to talk about it in these pages. I offer my excuses nevertheless for not being able to treat in the manner usual in this periodical—which is to say, in isolation—only those questions that fall into its domain, and for depriving the following considerations of certain literary impressions whose abstraction would spoil the article.

  If it is not premature to discuss things as soon as they come into being, except to affirm their existence, scientific marvel fiction is ripe for critical study. The present day permits its identification. The inevitable product of an era in which science predominates—without, however, extinguishing our eternal need for fantasy—it is a genuinely new genre that is beginning to expand, and of which H. G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau and Charles Derennes’ Le Peuple du pôle can furnish use with two adequate type specimens—Dr. Moreau being a surgeon who makes humans out of animals, and the people of the pole being a tribe of intelligent and civilized beings who have the same antediluvian provenance as ourselves, but who have remained saurians while we have become mammals.

  I say that this is a genuinely new genre. Until Wells, its existence was doubtful. In fact, prior to the author of The War of the Worlds, the rare practitioners of what might later be called the “scientific marvelous” only devoted themselves to such work at rare intervals, occasionally, and, it seems, playfully. All of them treated it as inconsequential fantasy; none of them specialized in it and most of them combined it with other elements. Cyrano de Bergerac used it to support utopias; Swift used it as a framework for satires; in our own era, Camille Flammarion has recruited it to make certain metaphysical ideas that are too abstract for the ordinary reader a little more concrete; as for Edmond About, he approaches it from the opposite direction, turning it into comedy, thus contriving in advance of its existence parodies of a genre to come—compare Le Nez d’un notaire with The Island of Doctor Moreau. The sequence of these bastard, hybrid productions is, moreover, far from being closed; utopians who “need a world” possess therein a means of dislocation too precious to abandon, and satirists will be unable to deprive themselves of the resources offered to them by such a method of allegory and allusion.

  Edgar Poe, in only two stories, “The Facts in the Case of Monsieur Valdemar” and “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains”46 founded the pure scientific marvel story, just as he founded the detective story in three other prototypical stories, but the latter were so complete and synthetic, so absolutely definitive, that in that respect he could only inspire imitators, and not a single disciple. By contrast, in the world of the scientific marvelous, he had celebrated apostles, since Villiers de l’Isle-Adam wrote L’Eve future,47 Stevenson Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, and now, finally, there is H. G. Wells. With the last-named, the genre with which we are presently concerned is deployed in all its integral amplitude, and its definition completed, in order that people might undertake to give it a name, celebrate its life and certify its existence, in the manner of a baptism.

  Let no one be deceived, though; although the mastery of Wells in imagining and exploiting the themes of the scientific marvelous have ensured the glory of the English novelist, by no means all of his works are specimens of it; I only categorize five novels and a few short stories as such. The novels are The War of the Worlds, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The First Men in the Moon, The Invisible Man and The Time Machine, and the short s
tories include “In the Abyss,” “The New Accelerator,” “The Truth About Pyecraft” and “The Stolen Bacillus.”48

  Without mentioning socialist prophecies and some works of a rather ordinary kind, there are, indeed, a few works by Wells in which the scientific marvelous is only a pretext for philosophizing, or a secondary factor in a mystery, and which, for that reason, we shall not admit—The Food of the Gods is an example. This is not to say, we ought to remark, that in the five novels and several short stories included, Wells forsakes satire or didacticism—on the contrary—but the important lessons that he offers us therein arise so naturally from a scientific marvel plot that he does not even need to spell them out, and he takes the stories of prodigious discovery or extraordinary events featured in such works to their conclusions without any digression or revelation of the subtext—as exemplified by that formidable moral tale The Island of Doctor Moreau. There are also other works—which are also very curious, and make Wells an authentic innovator—in which it is not science but logic alone, considered not as science but as a habit of mind, which intervenes in the marvelous. I separate them out too, and propose to apply to those fables—The Wonderful Visit, for example—the term “logical marvelous,” reserving “scientific marvelous” for those which present us with the adventure of a science extrapolated to the point of a marvel, or a marvel envisaged scientifically.49

  There, at any rate, is a definition, albeit a vague one, and we can be content with it provisionally, while waiting for another and more concise one to be extracted from a more profound examination.

  What is the genesis of scientific marvel fiction? Where are the subjects that it is able to treat obtained? What is the technique of this recent art? It is tempting to analyze, one work at a time, the entire production of the aforementioned authors, in order to identify the particular disciplines that have regulated their fantasy in the elaboration of hypotheses and the pursuit of extrapolations, and then to extract therefrom the laws of a general methodology. That is a crude method, to which many Romantic genres are resistant, but ours emerges from it triumphant. That dissection shows us a powerful solid skeleton, which is reason itself; it reveals something akin to an organic tissue of wisdom and ingenuity.