Georges indicated the magical panorama with a gesture.
“Look,” he said, in a warm, ardent voice. “See how beautiful the night is. Listen—can’t you hear the nightingale, out there, in the tall acacias? Can’t you see the branches quivering? That joyful song is a concert that the bird of lovers offers to other birds hiding under the leaves. An imperceptible murmur is exhaled from the earth and troubles the night: it’s the mysterious toil of saps ascending in the branches, causing the buds to expand and the flowers to bloom. In that marvelous night, everything seems to be asleep but nothing is; everything is loving. Spring exalts the fevers of life, with which generate frissons in animals, plants, insects…everything submissive to the eternal charm of renewal.”
Jeanne turned to George, her face impassive. “Forgive me, my friend, but I don’t hear the murmurs that you grasp through your excitement; I only see the need to reproduce animals and plants. Beyond that, nothing.”
He wrung his hands in despair. “Oh, Jeanne, Jeanne! How can you be as insensible as you are to so much beauty, so much poetry? Don’t you understand, in the face of the prodigious example that nature gives us, that there is something monstrous in abstracting oneself from the sublime duty that the smallest beings accomplish in which spring palpitates? Everywhere around us, Jeanne, the accomplishment of acts of love continue life, and we, too, young, handsome, vigorous and healthy, will be alone, like monsters, in remaining cold, uselessly and culpably sterile...”
He stopped, and considered the young woman’s astonished face at length. And when she did not reply, he continued: “Scents are rising up to us, Jeanne. They intoxicate me, excite me—and they’re the perfumes of saps, the odor of the earth, like a stimulation compounded out of all its effluvia. You don’t sense that, Jeanne?”
She looked at him, rather wearily, with pity. “No, Georges, I’m not troubled at all, because I’m a stranger to that genetic folly. I understand you, but I’m doubtless essentially abnormal, for my flesh doesn’t quiver at all these manifestations you point out to me, and isn’t moved in the slightest by gestures complementary to the perpetuation of species, the observation of which only interests me as a problem. What do you expect, then? We’re not speaking the same language. I’m only impassioned before a scientific mystery, a primitive unknown, but you’re talking about banal, simple approaches…so simple…as old as animality.”
Bitter and despairing, he replied: “Why live if we have to abstract ourselves from the laws of nature, if we have to abolish within us the noblest instincts?”
“In order to work, to pierce the thick darkness of rebirth and death, and to produce, to know, to create animal life—the causes of the acts before which you’re ecstasizing—scientifically. Isn’t that much finer that carrying them out ourselves, bestially?”
“Always study! Always that avidity to know that persecutes you. Oh, Jeanne, if you could read in me, if you were able, one day, by means of your science, to perceive the devotion, the idolatry, the immense love that there is in my heart, you’d be so astonished that you’d melt...”
She laughed, and said: “Read in you…examine your heart, your amorous brain. That’s an offer not to be refused!”
“Oh, Jeanne, why mock? You’re mocking, and yet, if you asked me, if you really wanted it, I’d tell you to take this brain, and this heart, since my entire being belongs to you. I love you, so I’m yours. In any case, after your refusal to respond to my love, perhaps it would indeed be better for my wretched body to become laboratory flesh. In sum, I belong to you; dispose of my body, my brain, my entire being, whenever you wish and however you please.”
She looked at him coldly and thought: The fool. He’s quite capable of it! Oh!
So it was true: there were men ready to sacrifice everything, to make an abstraction of their own joys, their dearest ambitions, their human envelope—their life, in sum—to make an imbecile holocaust offered to a beloved woman! It was, then, possible that love, the superior power whose domination she hoped never to suffer, had the power to transform superb males into slaves, generous forces into nothingness?
She shivered and mentally congratulated herself on feeling invulnerable. But as she had accorded the subject too much time, she thought that it was necessary to go to work, and that her father was waiting for her.
“Go to bed, Georges,” she said. “You’re in no state to aid me this evening.”
She pushed him in front of her, down the stairs. And she went without looking, at least in a poetic sense, at the magnificent nocturnal landscape of the banks of the Seine, the magic of the sky, all of nature in heat, under the most scintillating stars, without listening to the end of the song of the nightingale, launching its trills into the trees, without breathing in the intoxicating odor of saps and the fecund earth, and without seeing that two fireflies were chasing one another over the windows of the belvedere, in the caressant breeze.
VIII. The Talking Corpse
Jeanne went down to the basement of the house and went into a large room, entirely white, in which her father was already working: the secret laboratory where Fortin and his daughter studied together in the quiet hours of the night, propitious to meditation. The walls were covered in ceramic tiles and the flagstones gleamed, immaculate and neat. A dazzling light descended from arc-lamps hanging from the ceiling, as white as a reflector. To one side, continuing the laboratory, a large space was reserved for electrical machines. The powerful current furnished by the city served to activate the special apparatus installed by the doctor for the needs of his research.
“Well, Father, “said Jeanne, “are we finally going to get some rest?”
For her, in fact, everything that had happened since dusk had been a social chore. Only now was she about to know the veritable joys, the rare sensations that caused her—so cold ordinarily—to vibrate like a lover in an embrace.
An anatomical body was lying on the marble tale that occupied the middle of the room. The chest was open. She approached it, leaned over the dead organs, and took the man’s heart in her hands.
“So,” she said, contemplating the bizarre object—hypertrophied, because it was the body of a sick man—“this, if one can believe sentimental verbiage, is the sacred tabernacle in which that incomprehensible sentiment resides. This one belonged to an unfortunate who committed suicide last week over the body of the wife he’d just murdered: a drama of jealousy. It’s the heart of a great lover, then, a passionate man?”
She turned it over and back again, and then, having discovered nothing in the bloody viscera but repugnant defects, threw it into a corner, disgustedly.
“To serious things now,” she said.
She put on a long white smock and leaned over the cadaver prepared by her father. They were continuing research begun a long time ago with a view to the great discovery that impassioned their lives; for a few days now they had sensed that they were on a profitable track. All the merit for that reverted to the young woman. Thus, she was nervous and excited, for she had glimpsed a little light in the cold darkness of the Unknown, and had been seeking ardently every day and every night.
She wanted, quite simply, to make the dead man live. She had taken pleasure in deciphering the enigma of human existence.
For a long time, the cellular life of living matter had no longer had any secrets from her. She had traced the most mysterious organic functions back to their sources; but what remained to be regulated and put in order was the functional mechanism of animate bodies and, above all, the harmony of actions with the brain: thought.
She had the impression—the certainty, even—that it would be possible to reanimate a corpse. She could make the blood circulate in the arteries again, make the heart beat, activate the nerves and muscles, but the resuscitated individual would only be an automaton, whose slightest actions would, alas, be manifestations of her own will, reflexes of her own brain.
All that she thought as she rummaged in the flesh of the cadaver displayed on the operating
table. She had put the encephalum of the individual in contact with electric wires, and she studied the reactions provoked by the current in various instances, but obtained nothing conclusive.
Oh, she thought, if only, instead of a man dead for four days, I could have a warm body, recently taken like a loaf of bread hot from the oven of life, I sense that I could attain the goal easily…but how can I procure one?
It was not the first time that she had been preoccupied by that idea. Already, in fact, she had tried to obtain a provision of anatomical flesh other than through the intermediary of the amphitheaters. With the blithely amoral and slightly cynical carelessness of fanatical researchers she had had no compunction about making contact with a shady gang of nightprowlers, to whom she had promised five hundred francs for every body found on the public highway. There were more of them than one might think. The popular quarters were often the theater of brawls that ended tragically. There was also the occasional recalcitrant drunkard stabbed to death by an apache on some street corner for his wallet. A prowler, perceiving the cadaver before the police, might easily be able to load it into a fiacre and bring it to her.
That had happened, in fact, three times, but the anatomical specimens were in too poor a state to be useful. They were the bodies of sick people, alcoholics undermined by tuberculosis and venereal disease. The organs were not healthy, and that complicated the research instead of facilitating it. She had promised, then, a thousand francs for a brand new cadaver, of an individual of sound constitution—and that was the cause of an adventure whose memory embarrassed her now, and which had, moreover, nearly attracted the worst annoyances.
One of the apaches in her pay had found no better means to satisfy her and get hold of the large reward than to attempt to murder a boxing champion as he was returning to his domicile in Lévallois-Perret one evening. He had only been saved by the sudden arrival of police cyclists, who had captured the bandits. To explain his action, the apache, confident in the intervention of the celebrated Dr. Fortin, had told the police Commissaire the whole story. Naturally, the latter had not believed the unexpected justification but, simply in order to acquit his conscience, he had had the famous scientist interrogated by an agent of the Sûreté. After an energetic denial from Fortin, the case had been closed. The apache was given a few months in prison, but the doctor and his daughter had decided to do without the help of those dangerous collaborators in future.
Which doesn’t alter the fact, Jeanne thought, that if I could get my hands on a recent cadaver, I could attempt a decisive experiment.
She was standing gravely and meditatively over the man displayed on the table when precipitate footsteps were heard outside the door. Fortin opened it, and found himself facing Frédéric, the domestic—but a Frédéric in great distress, whose face expressed an immense terror.
“What is it?” exclaimed the doctor. “What’s the matter with you? And why are you disturbing us at this hour?”
“Oh, Monsieur, Monsieur, someone rang the doorbell of the house a little while ago, at three o’clock in the morning. It’s not credible...”
“Well, did you go to see who it was?”
“Yes, Monsieur. I opened the door cautiously, of course, for a visit in the middle of the night didn’t suggest anything good to me...”
“And?”
“There was a sort of individual at the top of the steps, bent double, limp, with eyes capsized, like the eyes of a corpse. His arms were dangling alongside his body, his soft legs seemed hardly to be touching the ground, and I thought—forgive me, Monsieur—I thought I saw a dead man come in!”
Fortin and his daughter started. Together, they said: “He came in, you say?”
“Yes. He came down the stairs behind me, bumping into the walls. Ah! There he is...”
A strange apparition was, indeed, framed in the doorway: the dead man of the Avenue Henri-Martin.
Jeanne Fortin and her father were too familiar with cadavers, and also with the secret of life, to believe in hallucinations or ghosts. All the same, that unexpected spectacle impressed them strangely.
The dead man, still similar to a grotesque marionette, with his head hanging down, his arms dangling and his legs unsteady, seemingly dragging his feet, with his body like a deflated waterskin, or a carnival dummy empty of stuffing, was frightful, tragic and menacing...
“What does this joke signify?” said Jeanne, in a harsh voice, advancing toward the tottering cadaver.
Then the dead man stopped, facing her. He ceased to tremble; his swaying arms became still, stiffening against the body, and the nodding head was raised up. The livid face, with terrified eyes, appeared in the harsh light and the young woman, at that moment, acquired the absolute certainty that he really was dead.
Grimly skeptical, but interested nevertheless by the troubling problem, she waited.
And the cadaver, whose lips were exceedingly hollow at the junctures, as if iron fingers were digging in there, displayed clenched teeth, between which words nevertheless emerged dully.
“Didn’t you wish, as a splendid bouquet capable of moving you, for the body of a dead young man, still warm? I’m the flowers, Jeanne; I’m the dead man you asked for.”
Two eyes, at that moment, shone beside the dead man: two intelligent, opaline irises, but alone, not belonging to any visible human being.
“Ah! Is that you, Marc?” the young woman interrogated. “Is it really you, Vanel?”
The two emerald irises were extinguished; the eyes vanished, and the dead man resumed walking, tottering, the head and arms dangling. When he reached the marble table, he seemed to bend double, and to raise himself up. For a moment, the horrible marionette seemed to float, suspended in midair, and, after two or three grotesque lurches, he fell full length onto the marble table, with a soft dull sound of fresh meat.
IX. The Marvelous Automaton
Alone in the secret laboratory with the white ceramic tiles, Dr. Fortin and his daughter were meditating beside the cadaver. Frédéric, on their order, in spite of his emotion and the strangeness of the event, had gone to bed. In the room violently illuminated by powerful arc-lamps, there were now only two individuals, sincerely troubled by the adventure, but glad of the windfall, and also transfigured by the new problem of which they might perhaps—who could tell?—find the solution that night.
Where did the cadaver come from? It does not matter much to them. A single exchanged glance has reassured them, and they had immediately set to work. It was a surprise. Contrived how? By whom? Marc Vanel? Why bother wondering? For the moment, the windfall was sufficient.
Jeanne is very pale, shivering with hope. Clad in her white smock, beneath which her firm breasts are revealed, with her arms bare to the elbows, also as white as alabaster, and her hair full of gilt reflections under the arc-lamps, she resembles some virgin priestess of an infernal religion on the point of accomplishing a frightful sacrifice.
And yet she is beautiful, with the cold beauty of an antique statue. Her movements have the harmonious suppleness of a sacred dancer, but there is a disquieting and formidable determination in her eyes.
She leans over the body lying on the marble table, the naked body splendid now in its young and vigorous form.
“What a pity!” she says. “He was a handsome fellow. But the luck, for us, is that he isn’t yet cold.”
She palpates him, examining him attentively. Of what did he die? Avidly, the doctor and his daughter search, exploring the young man’s nudity.
Finally, Jeanne exclaims: “What a curious wound! An expert in jiu jistu has broken the vertebral column at the base of the neck.”
The father and daughter look at one another. Then, having reflected, Fortin asks: “What are we going to do? There has obviously been a crime. Merely by the fashion in which he was dressed when he arrived here, it’s easy to deduce that strange hands have put his clothes on. Thus, the man was killed while he was in bed. That’s curious. In what bed was he lying? The whole problem is there
: a drama of love, of adultery, perhaps? It’s a sensational affair. What do you think, Jeanne?”
“The same as you’ve supposed. But I don’t suppose you have any intention of alerting the law?”
“Obviously not. Even so, I’m anxious. This young man—to judge by the clothes he was wearing and a detailed examination of his person—is wealthy. His disappearance will make the devil of a row...”
But Jeanne had to intention of being separated from a body so miraculously found, propitious for an audacious experiment that she had been waiting for months for an opportunity to carry out.
“A search?” she said. “Come on, Father—how could anyone suspect us? You know the singular fashion in which the cadaver was presented to us.”
They looked at one another. The same name was in their minds: Marc Vanel. But how had he done it? Certainly, the dead man’s words betrayed his work, since they had made allusion to a desire that Jeanne has expressed that same evening. There was, however, no explanation for that macabre, supernatural, impressive scene.
Responding to her intimate reflections, Jeanne said: “He’s strong. We need to attach ourselves to that precious collaborator, Father, at any price. Anyway, let’s not hesitate to make use of the gift he’s made us. Then again, that doesn’t prevent us from occupying ourselves with the poor fellow, whatever happens, and even of seeking to punish those who have murdered him. Are we not administrators of justice ourselves, with formidable forces at our disposal, more powerful than other men possess?
“Besides which, listen: I’m going to try the decisive experiment of which I’ve dreamed day and night, for which I’ve prepared everything, studied everything and foreseen everything. I’m going to restore life to this cadaver. If I succeed, he’ll be able to strike those who’ve killed him on his own behalf. If I fail, and I’ll soon find out, we can figure out a way of returning his body to his family without compromising ourselves, and we’ll be his avengers. It will take the devil himself to prevent us finding out who he is and discovering his murderers.”
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