XX. A Stormy Night, A Night of Justice
In spite of the sky, which was becoming incessantly cloudier, but was still sufficiently bright, the two men followed a path on the edge a little wood, along the enclosing wall. Only the sound of the barrow’s wheels troubled the silence. It was half past eleven. In the villa, everyone ought to be asleep. No light was shining in the windows.
“Stop here,” said Etienne, in a low voice. “The shade of that big tree seems encouraging to me.”
Jean Chrysostome placed his barrow next to the wall. At that moment, without him having had time to realize what was happening, the knife-grinder was seized by the throat and at the same time the barrel of a revolver was pressed to his forehead.
“Don’t move, or you’re dead,” said a voice.
He did as he was told and did not budge, awaiting events. Etienne, who had already set foot on the grindstone in order to hoist himself up to the top of the wall was seized and violently thrown down on to the ground. Turned over by a kind of colossus, his arms were wrenched harshly backwards and bound with rope.
Fabio Canti, who was holding onto the knife-grinder, relaxed his grip. “What do we do with this one?” he asked.
“Let him go. I obtained information about him this afternoon. He’s a vaguely worthy man. He must be unaware that he’s the accomplice of a parricide. Yes, get away! And don’t breathe a word—you’ll compromise yourself, in any case, if you tell anyone what’s just happened to you.”
Taking hold of the shafts of his barrow, Jean Chrystostome disappeared into the darkness. And the man who had mastered Etienne, astounded by the rapidity of events, leaned over him abruptly, furious, with a concentrated anger, shining the light of a pocket torch onto his own face.
“Do you recognize me now, Monsieur Etienne?”
“Lafon! What are you doing here?”
“My duty, by preventing you from committing a new crime, while wanting to spare you the shame of the Court of Assizes. Your accomplice, Baudard, who denounced you, has been sentenced to twenty years hard labor, but you wouldn’t have attenuating circumstances. You, guilty of parricide, incest and fratricide, wouldn’t avoid the scaffold!”
“The scaffold!” stammered the murderer, changed in ten months, unshaven and graying.
“I’m not alone. There’s your father’s widow, whom I need to protect, and your young brother.” In a dull voice, he added: “There’s also the honor of the factory. It’s better that you do justice to yourself.”
“So be it,” said Etienne. “Untie my arms. I have a Browning in my pocket. I’ll blow my brains out.”
“No,” said Fabio Canti. “We don’t want your cadaver found so near. We’re going to take you to the Pont du Tournant, which spans the Luron, from which your accomplice Baudard, condemned to the labor camp, thought he was throwing your brother in his pram, and you’re going to take a dive from there.
While speaking, the Venetian and very Parisian painter was exploring the exterior pockets of the young man’s jacket. He brought out a revolver and a sturdy knife freshly sharpened.
“These are playthings that it’s dangerous to leave to a fellow like you. Let’s go—en route for the Tarpeian rock. And walk straight, because, at the slightest sign of resistance...”
“And what if I refuse? Your duty is to arrest me. That way, I’d have a few more months to live.”
“Coward!” proclaimed Lafon. “Coward! I’m going be forced to kill you—me, who knew you as a little boy—like a mad dog.” Calming down, he added, in a low and supplicant voice: “For the name of your father, for the honor of the Factory! Monsieur Etienne, I implore you...”
Etienne Aubert had got a grip on himself again. “Let’s go,” he said, hoarsely. “Show me the way.”
The long journey, which seemed interminable to the two administrators of justice, between whom the condemned man marched at a pace equal to theirs, was made in silence. The storm was rumbling in the sky, which had become utterly dark, and in the hearts of the three men. From time to time, great flashes of lightning, in zigzags or frayed sheets, illuminated the mountain, the whole shore all the way from Cannes to Juan-des-Pins, and the glaucous sea, stirred by the tempestuous wind.
That temporary tragedy of nature enveloped and exasperated the storm that was agitating in the minds of the marching group. Louis Lafon, the old worker, his chest tight and his larynx gripped by the anguish of duty, would not, in any case, have been able to pronounce a single syllable.
Large raindrops were beginning to fall, a precursor of the formidable storm, the hurricane that was about to burst over the drama.
“Hurry up!” murmured the painter.
“Oh!” said Etienne, mockingly.
The artist perceived, in a flash of lightning followed by an enormous roll of thunder, a rock bordering the road, which overhung the torrent, in the abyss.
“No need to go as far as the Pont du Tournant. This precipice will do very well.”
Bursting suddenly, with unusual violence, after the prelude of large drops, the storm that had been threatening for such a long time was unleashed. Several lightning-flashes, almost simultaneous, illuminated the black, seemingly venomous, sky and the entire landscape, resplendently—and with a terrifying crash, a lightning bolt struck one of the large firs bordering the gulf, and set fire to it. It burst into flames, like a gigantic torch.
“This is it,” said Fabio Canti. “Will you please step forward, Monsieur.”
On the narrow plateau where the three men were, the other fir trees, illuminated in a sinister fashion by their shattered, blazing comrade—which was burning, hanging down, suspended by its roots over the enormous hole of velvet blackness—were displayed at intervals by the lightning streaking the clouds.
In the depths roared the torrent, which, at that place, revealed the foaming turbulence of its flow in the flashing gleams and the black rocks protruding from the banks.
Etienne Aubert, whose bonds Louis Lafon had just cut, advanced slowly, darting reckless glances around him under the threat of the revolvers of the two administrators of justice, who had bared their heads in a frisson of horror, and were holding their hats in their left hands.
A flash of lightning dazzled them all for the space of a second.
Etienne had seen Jean Chrysostome clinging to another fir on the edge of the gulf, pointing his finger at the blazing tree, to which the young fir was adjacent.
It was as rapid as the lightning, but Etienne had understood. There, perhaps, was salvation. To leap in such a fashion as to fall into those tresses of flaming green needles, into that mass of branches, of vegetable cordage, and to hang on there, in spite of possible burns; to crawl along and reach Jean Chrysostome, who was ready to seize him...
After that, he hesitated no longer. The desperate man stepped back slightly in order to brace himself for his leap, waited for another flash of lightning, and launched himself.
A scream mingled with the tumult of the torrent, a clap of thunder and the rain that was falling in veritable cataracts.
In the calculated effort that the parricide had made to leap in his necessary fashion, his feet had slipped on the damp moss, interrupting his thrust and the momentum of his projection, and had sent him tumbling down the slope.
He was swallowed up like a drowned fly.
XXI. On a Better Planet
Finale. There are always, in this world, worthy and ignoble people in all professions, even among wielders of the pen and artists of all kinds, among whom everything is worse, and whose natural egotism, appropriate to any individual, is complicated and exasperated by disgust for the rest of humankind and its ridiculous vanities. God is dead, in the wake the gods of paganism, and morals are no longer anything but obsolete, frayed, deformed and outmoded masks, still good for hypocrites and backward villains to hide their interests. The arrivistes, who were a minority, if not an exception, thirty years ago, when I published the novel L’Arriviste, have now become almost universal.
> Why not?
A child, as soon as he emerges from his mother’s womb, opens his mouth to breathe, to take in as much air as possible. Afterwards, as soon as he has been cleaned of the primal impurities, free of pollutants, he clings to the nourishing breast with all the might of his little hands, and empties it gluttonously. That continues, until old age sates him, or he no longer has the strength to hold onto anything throughout life.
But let us return to the characters of this story, whose heroes are, more or less, syntheses of our times.
Under the diluvian rain, Louis Lafon and Fabio Canti went back, somewhat frightened by what they had just done. In the morning, however, at eight o’clock, when the villa woke up, in the perfumed enchantment of its September roses, the sky had become once again—as often happens in the land of the sun, where tempest pass rapidly—very pure, a cloudless vellum, extraordinarily azure.
Never, at any rate, in that nest among the flowers, did the women and children—with the exception of Lafon’s aged wife—ever find out what had happened on that night of storm and justice.
Etienne Aubert’s cadaver, moreover, was never found. The torrent, its waters formidably swollen by the storm, had carried it away, with its four hundred thousand-franc bills. Money is useless when we are dead—even the dollar, the master of everything.
He was a man in love; he was a man at sea.
Etienne Aubert killed his father: “the Old Man.” But the State, too, after having decimated youth during the war, is killing old men, more slowly but surely, by reducing them to misery, without having anything to fear from them, because they no longer have the strength to protest. They have worked for forty or fifty years, only to see reduced by three quarters—and tomorrow to nothing—everything that they have saved up, by means of hard labor and privation, in order to provide for the winter of their existence. Unshakably confident, from 1914 to 1925, in the virtues and the guarantee of France, the petty rentiers have emptied their woolen purses to subscribe to all the national loans, while the artful, the nouveaux riches, have invested the profits of the war and their illicit gains abroad, transforming ill-gotten francs into pounds sterling or dollars.
The old men! The poor old men! They are robbed, they are ruined, and they are killed, pitilessly. While the young men, only aspiring to immediate and personal gains, form the syndicate of the under-thirties against the bearded, demanding all the high positions, all the well-paid jobs, for their generation, demanding, with the loud cries of savages, elbow room for their ambitions and their appetites, the old, downcast, do not dare to speak or act, clamoring silently, without daring to formulate the demand aloud, for SOMEONE who will reestablish order in minds, equilibrium in finance, master the great thieves and make them cough it up.
After the Directoire there was Bonaparte; after Painlevé, Caillaux and Briand, then, WHO?
Sixte Coutan, having become a Parisian député in the elections of 11 May 1924, borne by the triumphant list of the Cartel des Gauches, has placed himself, while waiting to lick the boots of the future tyrant—if he has boots—in the ranks of the party in power, in case public opinion wants to scythe down the fortunes of the most extraordinary profiteers.
At any rate, the skillful, uncertain about tomorrow, are, like the young people, putting into practice the formula: Enjoy! after having flattened, flung to the ground face down, in the distress justified by their stupidity, the fools of foresight and the cretins of thrift.
Enjoy! Enjoy!
Sixte Coutan has just bought a very well-situated villa at Beaulieu-sur-Mer, in that haven of idleness where the multicolored carpet of the flowers overflows from every terrace, the Little Africa where a general staff has installed itself who want to build another Gaming Palace—competition for Monte Carlo, more frequented by riff-raff and the vulgar—in a delightful decor, in Italy, two kilometers from the French border. Sixte Coutan, Parisian député, who is paying court to Mussolini for the supreme authorizations of the King and President of the Council of the Crown of Italy, is a member of the consortium. And Josette is an even prettier and more troubling octopus, whose adorable arms and legs are irresistible tentacles, which serve to capture prey for her smiling mouth and her secret mouth.
Sans-Liquette? What became of her?
Nobody knows.
Everywhere, there is dancing. Little Brother, it’s necessary to enjoy; Mesdames, it’s necessary to enjoy. And as Anquetil says, Satan is the conductor of the ball.75 The jazz band symbolizes, for those escaped from the immense slaughter, and for the children of the great five-year beastliness, the clownish incoherence, the buffoonery and the uproar of society, the cynical and disjointed saraband of the human race.
What does it matter? After us, the abyss.
But before then, smile.
As for Berthe Jafaux, Souriah the Seeress, people were able to read in the newspapers, toward the end of the month of May 1924:
The young woman, whom the celebrated and mysterious Dr. Marc Vanel, known to his admirers as Homo-Deus, has been cared for in a cataleptic state, and whose crisis has lasted for fifty days, only emerged from that semi-death to die, veritably, a few hours later. Dr. Marc Vanel was able to observe a singular case of mental duality, which he had doubted until then, believing that he was dealing with a simulator, an extremely common circumstance among hystero-somnambulists, but when the sick woman—whom humorists called “the double banâme”76—realized that she was about to die, any imposture became improbable. She displayed a singular satisfaction at being liberated from an envelope that horrified her, and said:
“Finally, I can quit this slut whose body I’m sharing, and this dirty planet.”
Nice, 27 April 1925.
Afterword
Homo-Deus, Don Quixote and Asmodeus
In one of the latter chapters of “The Invisible Satyr”—although one might reasonably assume that it was written before much of the text that precedes it, Marc Vanel compares himself to Don Quixote, not meaning to imply that he is a deluded madman, but suggesting that he sees himself as a knight-errant in pursuit of a sacred ideal of chivalry and romantic love. He is, of course, not being serious, although the lovestruck Huguette, to whom he is speaking, immediately replies that Don Quixote has always seemed to her to be the very model of nobility.
In fact, as the conventions of superhero fiction developed subsequent to 1924, especially in comic books—most especially of all when American comic books fell under the aegis of the “comic book code” in the 1950, following a moral panic about their possible effects on impressionable young minds—Don Quixote, in the sense of a knight-errant in pursuit of a sacred chivalric ideal, really did become a kind of proto-archetype on which superheroic virtue could and ought to be modeled, but Félicien Champsaur had no way of knowing that, so Vanel’s comparison is not quite as ironic as it might seem now.
The narrative voice, of course, uses an entirely different standard of comparison repeatedly and consistently, describing Homo-Deus as “satanic,” “Mephistophelean” and “Vanel-Satan,” while Simone d’Armez calls him “Dr. Satan” and wonders, at one point, if her invisible haunter might really be the Devil—all of which supports the possibility that one of the initial inspirations for the story might have been Lesage’s Diable boîteux, and that Homo-Deus deliberately echoes Asmodeus as well as translating as Man-God. At any rate, the satanic connection, even if it is merely metaphorical, might well help to explain the striking difference between Homo-Deus, in his guise as a freelance “administrator of justice,” and all the superheroes who came after him. Not one of those sucessors ever employ a method of administration that consists of murdering people—one of them an innocent whose uniqueness arguably made him exceedingly precious and the other a blind old woman—and then framing other people for the murders. Don Quixote would certainly never have done any such thing, and nor would Superman, Batman, or any of their multitudinous clones.
Given that, on top of his activities as a murderer, thief and accepter of bri
bes—not to mention his exploits as a satyr, which begin with an effective rape that can hardly be excused one the grounds of the deluded victim’s enjoyment—it is perhaps a trifle odd that his supposedly virtuous associates seem to see Homo-Deus as a hero to be admired rather than a villain as contemptible as those he fits up for his own crimes. They are presumably unaware of the full range of his activities, but not to the extent of being completely deluded as to his nature.
Perhaps the Fortins are laboring under the illusion that the Vauclins really did kill Julien for a second time, although their failure even to wonder or to ask about it seems a trifle negligent. They are, of course, inclined to forgive Homo-Deus almost anything, on the grounds of his being a scientist, just as they are willing to forgive themselves for some extremely dodgy actions, and they sympathize with his misanthropy and disgust for human fallibility, but they would surely agree that a line has to be drawn somewhere, and would certainly not find it easy to draw it in such a way that Homo-Deus remained on the right side of it.
It is perhaps worth noting that the male protagonist of Champsaur’s previous novel, Ouha, was also an unrepentant thief, killer and rapist—but he really did have a sound explanation and a good excuse for his conduct, in that he genuinely did not know any better, and had no mental or moral equipment to allow him to suppress or deflect the terrible impetus of his instincts. Seen from an objective viewpoint, Ouha is clearly a better man than Marc Vanel, but that is perhaps not surprising, given that Ouha, although mostly ape, is a little bit human, while Marc Vanel is thoroughly satanic, even when he protests—as he does more than once—that there are times when he is only human.
Homo-Deus’ intervention in the plot of the second novel, although slight, is equally morally dubious, in terms of what he does not do as well as what he does. In general, in fact, his inactions are even more questionable than his actions, although he seems inordinately proud of some of them. (How much moral credit can a man really expect for occasionally refraining from rape?) That record of culpable inaction is, of course, matched by his record of non-accomplishment; in the climax of “The Invisible Satyr” the humble Frédéric accomplishes far more in the matter of combating evil in three minutes than Vanel has accomplished in a year, when he unexpectedly stumbles on an acute danger of which Homo-Deus is the sole cause, having casually exposed his innocent friends to mortal danger by association.
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