The Wing

by Jean Richepin

  Aunt Aline, seeing through the most opaque veils, had not taken so long. One might have thought, when she had first been introduced to Mademoiselle de Saint-Ylan, that she was “finding her again.” And on hearing her speak, overcome with emotion, she exclaimed: “It’s Idalie’s voice!”

  She alone could know that. And why should she be mistaken? And that was one more reason why Thibaud loved his wife.

  Alas, that amour, so tender and sweet, although so dissimilar to what is normally described by that name—that sweet sisterly affection in which two souls melted without having need of their bodies—poor Thibaud was not to enjoy for long. And of the few misfortunes that tried to kill his happiness, that alone had taken on the aspect of a catastrophe of terrible magnitude. A year after the wedding, his wife was dead.

  “Like Idalie,” Aunt Aline had remarked.

  For it was also in bringing a new Gasguin scion into the world that the poor creature departed, and by virtue of the same accident: a fatal attack of eclampsia.

  Thibaud almost died of grief before his shattered happiness. But it was not Aunt Aline who was able to bring him consolation at that moment. Silent, devoid of tears, she watched a sentence “come to life” inside herself, in the blackest blackness of her most profound self, and writhe like a fiery serpent, which she dared not pronounce aloud but thought with an extraordinary force:

  It had to happen, and it’s better thus.

  Why did it have to happen, and why was it better thus?

  We would be lying in even insinuating that she might know. Nevertheless, we must confess that everything happened as if someone or something knew it for her.

  Suppose, in fact, that Anne-Herminie-Luce had survived. Thibaud would gradually have got a taste for the paradise of his household, and doubtless even for the fruit that he had initially considered forbidden, having only bitten into it once. And, fairly rapidly, he would have become what Yvernaux had suggested that he become, believing himself destined to it, and because he really was destined to it, in the capacity of a Gasguin—which is to say, the mediocre bourgeois, the humble universitarian following his banal career until his anticipated retirement.

  That death, by way of compensation, returned him to himself, to science, and, above all, to his true fate, exceptional in this: that he was to serve as the preparer, the initiator, and later the collaborator, of a genius of which he was to be the reflection.

  And that is what Aunt Aline sensed; that was what the Sphex of the race of Hescheboix had worked for so long in advance, and so surely, in her instinctive determination. The larva could be born now.

  And, indeed, Geneviève had just been born.

  XI

  In a family in which Aunt Aline did not exist—which is to say, probably, any other than Thibaud Gasguin’s—nothing would have seemed notable in the actions and gestures associated with the advent and early infancy of Geneviève. No one would even have thought that there were actions and gestures there. The craziest and most doting of grandmothers would not have admired that which is ordinarily admired, in the most admired of babies—which is to say, that which causes such exclamations as “My God, what a dainty creature! There’s never been such a beautiful one! It’s a marvel without equal in all the world!”

  It was in terms less general, and with affirmations far more precise, that Aunt Aline observed and pointed out the merits that made Geneviève a miraculous individual.

  “She’s the spitting image of Idalie.”

  Such had been the welcoming greeting of the poor little wrinkled, grimacing, whimpering, blind thing, violet with congestion—and in order for Aunt Aline to have addressed it to her with such sincere devotion, she must really have seen her idol of splendid and ideal beauty resuscitated in that sort of obscure sketch promising nothing but a monster. She had said it with an accent so profound that the unfortunate Thibaud, in the anguish that was strangling him as he watched, at that very moment, his wife’s death throes, had not been able to help smiling at the compliment—which was, as he was not unaware, the greatest of which Aunt Aline was capable.

  And he had replied, tears of paternal pride mingling with those of his conjugal grief: “You think so, Aunt Aline? She’s beautiful, then?”

  “Yes, she’s beautiful!” the quinquegenarian had exclaimed, clapping her hands like a girl and shuffling her feet in a desire to dance. And to the tune of a popular song, she had sung, in a very low voice—yes, sung, at the bedside of the dying woman, really sung—in an old Thiéarchian patois, whose words were assonances in themselves:

  Belle! Amon! Chi teu n’crès nin l’vielle,

  Woit’ à chès leum’rott’s, min chtiot fieu.

  L’iau veet’dins l’or f’chès gluer d’solel

  Qu’étot l’fond d’s yux d’min p’tit bon Dieu.28

  It is evidently through the infant’s creased and as-yet-unopened eyelids that Aunt Aline was contemplating, in those dull and troubled “leumerottes” the perverse, seductive, profound, enveloping gaze of her dear Idalie—a gaze similar, indeed, to glaucous water flowing over a bed gilded by wispy rays of sunlight. It is necessary to believe, even so, that the veil of the eyelids and the vitreousness of vague pupils had not prevented the clear perception of reality, for later, when they really did open to the light, Geneviève’s eyes really were, at times, just as the old woman, who could not have seen them, had described them.

  It often happens that grave expressions pass over infants’ faces, in which one suddenly finds resemblances to some long-dead relative. It was thus with Geneviève, but Aunt Aline was never wont to evoke resemblances of that sort on such occasions. The memories that abruptly surged forth in her were much more ancient, and sprang up like geysers, originating from the utmost profundities of the race. Thus, at least the lyrical Yvernaux characterized them, having chanced to hear some of them, on the very day when he came for his goddaughter’s baptism.

  As the child, after having first cried on contact with the cold water and pulling a face on spitting out the salt, unexpectedly took on a meditative expression, furrowed by austere wrinkles, Aunt Aline had murmured: “A thousand years ago she knew that thought.”

  And short while later, as the baby’s face blossomed like a rose laughing in the sunlight when she finished feeding, and droplets of milk pearled in the corners of her mouth and dripped into her bib, the old woman had added, with a smile: “She’s counting her treasures.”

  Almost immediately, weary of the ceremony and drunk on the rich cream crammed into her by her nurse—a brunette galotte29 from Saint-Cast—the child had fallen deeply asleep. She was “blowing peas,” according to the old popular expression, and trickles of “flumes”—to employ an onomatopoeic Thiérachian term—were running down her chin. As the nurse reached out to wipe them away, Aunt Aline had stopped her with an abrupt command.

  “Leave it! That’s sap, from the time when she was a plant.”

  As for the pea-blowing, she was positively ecstatic about it, the darling now continuing it in her wicker cradle, the old peasant crib in which Gasguin himself had insisted on installing her. To please the godfather, who had offered a fashionable iron bassinet, painted cream, with muslin curtains with pink silk knots, the cradle had been overhung by those veils, which were suspended from a gilded curtain-rod—but Aunt Aline parted them in order to respire the little girl’s breath, and each pea blown the old woman said: “Another one! Big one! And one! And one! And this! And that! And one! Big one!”

  And at that moment, Gasguin would have willingly believed that she had fallen back into infancy, but not Yvernaux, whose imagination, stimulated by the formulaic game, reminded him of his distant past, and also—more especially—Aunt Aline’s brief muttered soliloquies. For, in those refrains, which Gasguin supposed to be merely remembrances borrowed from fairy tales—when he consented to suppose that they were anything at all—Yvernaux heard the voices of extinct things taking form again, and dead people coming back to life. He reflected expressly on the atavis
ms that phrase such as these suggested, rich in meaning for those who sought it out:

  “A thousand years ago she knew that thought.”

  “She’s counting her treasures.”

  “That’s sap, from the time when she was a plant.”

  To be sure, he said to himself, that poor old woman’s noggin can’t and shouldn’t take account of the mysterious meanings wrapped up in her words, which Yvernaux has sought and found there. He alone, he flattered himself—to Gasguin’s detriment as much as hers—embroidered those grandiose dreams on the canvas of coarse cloth. And yet, it was not him, the philosopher, and it really was her, the illiterate simpleton, who had uttered those sentences of formidable import, and who, at that moment, whispering in patois, her lips pinched so that almost nothing could be heard, had suddenly, after breathing in the baby’s breath, murmured this enormous thing, so powerfully perceived by her that her teeth chattered:

  “Y en d’s âmes, dins ch’tiot vint-là!”30

  It is true that Yvernaux, at that moment, was more than ever inclined to excitement, quite drunk on his godfatherhood, and also joyful at having seen the dream he had had of a family refuge whose pleasures he might have without its burdens realized so soon. From that, perhaps, came the facility at bouncing on trampolines of enthusiasm that were furnishing him—as he claimed—with Aunt Alice’s elastic expressions.

  It is indubitable, however, that for him to, quite apart from any godfatherly enthusiasm, his goddaughter was not a little girl like all the rest. And even Gasguin, if he had not been Geneviève’s father, would not have been able to help thinking her extraordinary. Aunt Aline’s tricks and nonsense aside, the child was certainly worthy of being noticed, and of being the subject of precious remarks.

  Her beauty, in spite of all the admiration for her famous resemblance to the idol Idalie, was far from being indisputable. That, while hiding it from Aunt Aline, Yvernaux and even Gasguin were forced to concede. Their paternal and parrainal (Yverneux’s term) indulgence went as far as the excuse of ingrate age, and would be prolonged without any interruption through all Geneviève’s ages. The equity of the scientists and the esthetics of the philosopher were not, however, able to acquiesce in the imperious affirmations of the indefatigable admirer, always decreeing, as at the moment of her birth: “She’s the spitting image of Idalie.” Unless, they declared, secretly, Grandmama Idalie had not, after all, had the miraculous beauty with which she was credited.

  If Geneviève was not that celebrated marvel, however, nor ever promised to be, she nevertheless did not give rise to any anxiety that she might turn into the ugly caricature in which the exquisite soul of her poor mother had been wrapped. All things considered, she was neither truly pretty nor the opposite.

  Her eyes alone answered to the eulogies that Aunt Aline had uttered in advance, and which their gaze and countersigned. They did not always merit those eulogies, though, or, at least, not the same ones—which made them more beautiful when they did, the ingenious Yvernaux suggested. And his ingenuity was fully justified. Although Geneviève’s eyes, in fact, even while she was still a child, often had a strange, attractive and almost dangerous seductiveness—the famous eyes of Idalie—they did not always have it, nor did they have it consistently. At certain times they seemed to be extinct. The wisp of gold in their depths was tarnished, losing its sunlight. The green of their water ceased to be the same transparent liquid. Their gaze became discolored then, their glaucous quality soon turning to gray, almost neutral. By way of compensation, though, at certain times, often after these intervals of effacement, they suddenly flared up with a strange gleam, as to the nature of which there was no conceivable doubt, for it was all intelligence.

  “That, Idalie didn’t have.”

  Thus Aunt Aline, impartial to the point of refusing something to her idol, had pronounced. On another occasion, she had made her idea more precise by specifying: “The Hescheboix males, yes.”

  And she had added, with a significant shrug of the shoulders showing what she thought of it: “Anyway, that—pfft!”

  But Yvernaux and Gasguin had immediately protested, and had given the phenomenon its true explanation; in unison, they almost shouted the retort, which defined the exact meaning of the famous “that,” by virtue of which, for the first time, they had dared to contradict the old sentence-spouter to her face:

  “It’s thought!”

  “Eh?” the old woman had queried. “What? Say again? What? You’re making fun of me!”

  “I tell you,” Yvernaux had insisted, bravely, “that in Geneviève’s eyes, at times, there’s a that that Idalie didn’t have, and I tell you that that that...”

  “Yes,” Gasguin had interrupted, “that, which the Hescheboix males couldn’t have had either, that...”

  “Well, what that?” the old woman had abruptly cut in, playing stupid. “What that?” And articulating the thats with an increasing hiss, she had repeated, volubly, until she could repeat no more, furiously, as if she were spitting the pfffts in the face:

  “That, that, that. pfft! pfft! That, that, pfft! That, pfft! pfft! pfft!”

  And then, both together, after a loud burst of laughter that she had thought stupid, they had started howling madly, with one voice, louder than hers and shutting her up:

  “Thought! Thought! Thought!”

  XII

  From that day on, Aunt Aline’s utterances of authoritative sentences had become increasing rare, and her sibylline semblance had become increasingly attenuated.

  This observation was made by Yvernaux on two consecutive trips, and corroborated each time by the testimony of Gasguin, who had also noticed it. And they both found great amusement—although on the “muchetenpot,” as they say in Thiérache—in the mortified expression that the old woman now had.

  At the same time, the father told the godfather, who came every year to spend a month’s holiday with them, about the incredible aptitude, increasing every day, the Geneviève manifested for the sciences.

  Yvernaux would have preferred that she had had aptitudes for other things that were dearer to his heart, in the appreciation of which he was more competent. With respect to the sciences in general, especially mathematics, he had to take Gasguin at his word. That was not, in the beginning, without a sort of chagrin, which freely translated itself into irony, even at the expense of his beloved godchild. One might almost have thought, at times, that he resented it, as if she were betraying him by not liking that which was not dear to him alone.

  “Oh,” he said, once, “as soon as a kid, especially a girl, throws herself into the undergrowth of algebra and walks without falling over, you equation-crunchers think she’s Pascal.”

  “Geneviève isn’t content to walk,” Gasguin had replied, imperturbably. “She dances.”

  “She’s the Terpsichore of logarithms, then!” Yvernaux had jeered. And as he had a good memory for all vocabularies, even those in which he could not put a clear meaning to the words, he reeled off a series of mathematical terms, making bracelets and necklaces for them with comical gestures, and continued, with fervor: “Yes, the Terpsichore of prime numbers, whose legs are guided by extractions of cube roots, which make points among the alternate internal angles and entrechats above the asymptotes—a Terpsichore that you are proud of having for a pupil, and to whom you teach the steps of the x2 + px + q = 0.”

  “When you’ve finished with your verbal buffoonery and juggling with words that you don’t understand, I’ll talk to you seriously about your goddaughter.”

  Yvernaux’s broad seam of boastfulness had been abruptly cut short and emptied by Gasguin’s interruption, made in a severe and serious tone, with a hint of scorn and a touch of near-mournful reproach. Fundamentally good and tender, adoring Geneviève more and more, the poor godfather had had tears in his eyes and had replied, very humbly: “Forgive me, old chap! I won’t insult the child any more. What I did was out of resentment of not being able to appreciate her famous aptitude fully, and knowledgeab
ly. Oh, if it were also for philosophy or lyricism, you’d see what I mean!”

  “But the sciences lead to philosophy and lyricism,” Gasguin replied, “as to everything else. Give it time! Geneviève isn’t yet twelve years old. At that age, Pascal had already reinvented—there’s no other word for it—the first two books of Euclid’s geometry with a ruler and compasses, and he would soon produce his treatise on conic sections, but that didn’t do him any harm when he eventually came to write Les Pensées, did it? Far from it.”

  That burst of eloquence, unusual for Gasguin, had completed his victory over Yvernaux—who wanted nothing better than to be beaten, anyway, and was content, since the true victor in the matter was Geneviève.

  There and then, the philosopher resolved to attempt something that seemed difficult, even slightly humiliating, which he had never had the courage to undertake, even when he was preparing for his doctoral examination in philosophy. Admitting to himself that he was perhaps a little too uniquely oratorical, and malnourished with facts, he finally deemed them necessary to “the health of his ideas,” as he put it. He regretted only having drunk “the strong wine of Science,” as he expressed it, in “the vague prelibations in which one only tastes the foam that consists of general ideas.”

  Loyally and sincerely, gripped by a beautiful passion for that Science of which his goddaughter seemed bound to become an Egregore,31 he became a student again in order to be able to follow her, no matter how far, on the route she was traveling. It was from that moment on that he gave the Latin Quarter the edifying spectacle of a doctor of letters transformed into a perpetual student.