The Necessary Evil

by André Couvreur

  Her nights were ardent, her dreams voluptuous, in which the image of Caresco imposed itself on the overexcitement of her nerves, leaving her tired in the morning, her limbs numb, her eyes sticky. And the pains of which she complained, imaginary thus far, she really began to feel, by virtue of a kind of auto-suggestion. A temporary jaundice even gave her skin a saffron tint.

  Then her parents became alarmed. Dr. Carhaux, who possessed an absolute authority over them, returned to see the young woman, examined her again from head to toe, tapped her and ausculated her, searched conscientiously, and persisted in his original diagnosis. In her prescription, valerian replaced the bromide that was not having any effect—for good reason.

  Before quitting Monsieur and Madame Romé, the doctor took them to one side, enquired as to Aline’s frequentations, asked whether the patient had not experienced any moral disturbance, any contradiction. No, nothing, the parents replied. He departed almost convinced that Aline had a secret that she did not want to reveal, and into which he, although something of a psychologist, did not dare to enquire.

  Days passed thus; the symptoms were accentuated; Aline, such a sweet-natured girl hitherto, became bad-tempered; her approach was impregnated with acrimony, she no longer responded to her mother’s kisses and tenderly interrogative glances.

  She was about to get up from the table to hide the sobs she was stifling when her father retained her with a gesture.

  “Come on, dear, stay with us for a little while longer. Are you suffering a great deal?”

  His voice was so paternal, so anxious, and so touching in its emotional affection, that Aline could not hold back the overflow of her bitterness. She buried her face in her handkerchief and wept, and wept. Madame Romé was infected by those tears, and began to blow her nose noisily. It was the first time that a genuine dolor had disunited the three enchained souls.

  Aline emptied her bile in a flood of words. “Yes, yes, I’m ill, very ill, and I feel that if I don’t receive better care I won’t be long delayed n disappearing into a tomb. Do you believe that I can continue to live on what I eat? I’m getting thinner, in a frightful fashion, and I always have these frightful pains, which rack me. Monsieur Cartaux doesn’t understand my malady; he’s old school. He’ll let me die without even soothing me. You love me, though, and you’re going to let me fade away like this? Oh, I’m truly unfortunate!”

  Madame Romé could not longer contain her grief. The father, equally distressed, but braver, put his napkin down on the table and tried to reason with her.

  “Come on, dear, you’re exaggerating the situation somewhat. I can see that you’re suffering but, after all, Monsieur Cartaux has reassured us as to your condition. You don’t have confidence in our old friend? Would you like us to ask him to bring another physician for a second opinion? Gladly, my child.”

  “No,” said Aline. “I no longer want Monsieur Cartaux, who treats my illness too lightly. I want to go see Monsieur Armand Caresco, who knows these matters admirably, since he’s operated on all these diseases of the liver. Aunt Bise told me so.”

  Monsieur Romé was astonished by the insistence with which his daughter put Armand Caresco’s name on the table. He saw the advisory influence of Madame Bise therein—and saw nothing else.

  “But my dear child,” he went on, “you know very well that it’s not appropriate to go and see another physician without being accompanied by the family physician…it would be a breach of manners with regard to Monsieur Cartaux—a serious breach—and we ought not to do that to him.”

  Aline was seized by a further crisis of despair. Madame Romé dried her red eyes, and then, desirous of not prolonging her daughter’s pain implored: “Come on, we’re not obliged to tell Monsieur Cartaux.”

  “No, I don’t want to do things that way,” her father insisted. “It lacks dignity.”

  At that moment, a footman announced Madame Bise. She came in like a cyclone, bubbling with all the impetuosity of her southern blood, out of breath from having climbed the stairs. Without paying any heed to the parents, she immediately went to the young woman.

  “Well, darling, how are you? What, you’re crying! Oh dear, something’s wrong!”

  She interrogated the dignified and calm attitude of Madame Romé, who, fearful of her sister’s exuberance, had repressed her tears when she arrived.

  “What! You’re letting her cry…!”

  “It’s nothing,” said Monsieur Romé, dryly. “Childishness.”

  “In that case,” proclaimed Madame Bise, “since your parents are causing you strife, I’ll take you away. We’ll go for a ride in a closed carriage. A little air will do you good.”

  A quarter of an hour later, Madame Bise’s coupé stopped in front of Armand Caresco’s house. Aline got down, profoundly emotional, upright, svelte and light on her feet, having forgotten her illness, entirely occupied with the adjustment of her skirt, heartbroken to be appearing before the desire man in mourning-dress.

  Finally, Madame Bise was taking her over the threshold at which she had gazed so many times in anguish. What was she going to tell the surgeon? What was he going to do? She did not even ask herself that, utterly given over to the joy and distress of seeing him again, of feeling the caress of his brown eyes again. She was no longer thinking about the comedy she had been playing for a month, the fault she was committing in going, with the sole and inconsequential support of Aunt Bise, into a house to which her access had not been authorized by her parents.

  The surgeon was expecting them. The valet immediately introduced them into the doctor’s study. The luxurious austerity of the place, and Armand’s gravity, chilled the young woman’s dreams to begin with. Then too, she was so petrified that she was disturbed; her cheeks turned pink and white in succession; the ground seemed to be vacillating under her feet. Armand, however, looked at her profoundly; she drank in the man’s domineering gaze.

  “Here’s the child,” said Madame Bise. “Save her.”

  Obsequiously, he offered them seats, took his place at his desk, and asked questions, to which Madame Bise responded most of the time, for Aline, who was hypnotized, in a contemplation akin to ecstasy, could only stammer incoherently. Madame Bise, however, took great care to specify that only the liver was afflicted.

  “We shall see,” said Armand. “Will you please take your clothes off, Mademoiselle.”

  Take her clothes off! Aline had never thought about that eventuality. She blushed scarlet, but was nevertheless desirous, and madly desirous, of contact. Behind a screen she unfastened her bodice. Her trembling fingers fumbled with the cords, no longer following the directions of her will, becoming disorientated among the knots.

  The skirt fell away.

  “The corset, Mademoiselle. It’s necessary to take off the corset so that I can examine you completely.”

  There was a further labor. Finally, the thin batiste chemise floated free…she had such pretty silk chemises…if she had only known! But she had not expected to be thus laid bare.

  She lay down on the low bed upholstered with an Oriental tapestry, and abandoned herself to palpation, her hands over her face, confused and trembling.

  Through the thin fabric he felt, taped, interrogated the sonorities of the thorax and the hypochondrium.

  “Don’t stiffen your abdomen, Mademoiselle, Relax. I won’t do you any harm.”

  He resumed his examination, with a lighter, subtler, more profound palpation. For the young woman it was an exquisite caress, which brought her to the confines of sensuality.

  “Yes,” said Caresco, “the liver is overflowing slightly, but there’s nothing very evident. It requires observation. In any case, surgically, there’s nothing to be done for the moment.”

  He withdrew the hand evocative of sensations from Aline’s abdomen. Only then, as he looked at her, did he have an intuition of the voluptuous effect that he had just produced. The young woman’s eyes were shining with a strange gleam, her attitude, simultaneously abandoned and tremulo
us, revealed the expectation of supreme spasms, reminding him of hysterics observed at the Salpêtrière, at the moment of crises of erotic overexcitement. If they had been alone, he would have been able to graze the fodder of amour, she offering herself with a violent contentment, exasperated by three months of troubled dreams, three months of obscure aspiration toward the blossoming of an instinct. And as the virgin still had an incomparable lust in her eyes, the surgeon could help submitting to their alluring radiation and could not look away.

  Aunt Bise marched in her southern fashion straight into the midst of that intimate drama, infinitely satisfied with Caresco’s opinion, which consisted precisely in having none.

  “That’s it,” she said. “At least, with you, one always knows where one stands. The little one will come to see you again soon. You understand that we can’t let her perish like this. Anyway, I’ll take all the responsibility.”

  “What responsibility can be in question?” asked Caresco.

  “Her family,” replied Aunt Bise, “only wants to hear mention of Dr. Cartaux...”

  Armand interrupted her. “One doesn’t go to consult Cartaux! He’s behind the times!”

  “So, he can’t tell from what my niece is suffering. He says it’s her nerves…everything’s put down to nerves nowadays. In my day, it was the blood. So I said to myself, my dear friend is the only one who can clear this up, and I brought her. Anyway, it’s quite simple—if her parents don’t like it, I’ll disinherit her.”

  During this chatter, Aline got dressed behind the screen, still overwhelmed. While veiling the brown splendor of her flesh she remained under the influence of the emotions of a little while before, aggravated by an unaccomplished act, enervated by a lack of satiation.

  Her ignorance, of a well-brought up girl, was not unmitigated by certain vague notions regarding the practices of amour, an imprecise knowledge extracted from conversations with friends, and the dangerous flirtations in which young people already old, initiators, delight in letting themselves divine things that they cannot explain, in sowing the seeds of a profligacy whose benefits they might reap later, after marriage. So she was surprised by the sensations she had experienced, desirous of pushing further on, convinced that the contact ought to go beyond a simple pressure on the abdomen, to lead to other satisfactions, and almost annoyed that the circumstances, the presence of Madame Bise, and the surgeon’s reserve had not permitted a more complete information.

  Armand Caresco returned to take his place at his desk. He scribbled a prescription. What was the matter with the young woman? He did not know. Perhaps it really was a particular nervous state, as Monsieur Cartaux had said. At any rate, it was nothing to worry about.

  While he wrote, his mind reverted to problems other than questions of pathology. He wondered by what enchainment of ideas, by what latent work of nature, Aline had just offered herself to him thus—for his superior intelligence had not been duped by the pretext. In her, there was no ancestral flaw; her parents were healthy and well-equilibrated. She had always been astonished by her own fortitude, her easy childhood, even sheltered from the usual minor injuries of childhood. Why, then, had she received such a violent cut of the whip, such a forceful impulsion to bring her to black malady? Would a similar adventure have happened to Aline with another man than him? Was he physically the first, as he was intellectually? Was he The Man, as he judged himself to be The Surgeon?

  As he rose from his seat to hand Madame Bise the piece of paper that he had just covered with his handwriting, a mirror sent back his portrait, and he contemplated it momentarily, studied the harmony of its lines, and found it strong and handsome.

  CHAPTER XII

  The Louis XV clock was slowly chiming nine, with a bright and cheerful ring, when Armand Caresco woke up in his mistress’ large soft bed. Weighed down at first by a leaden sleep due to fatigue and the ardent work of the preceding days, he had some difficulty in extracting his thoughts from the beneficent chaos in which they had been stranded, and, with a slack lassitude in his back and legs, he had an urge to prolong his repose—but the last strokes of the chime were like an appeal to the need for agitation that never slept within him, and the dominant idea of work and conflict tore through the mists of his mind, brutally completing the work of bringing him out of his blissful uncertainty.

  He moved, turning toward Mathilde, who with her right arm slid under her doll-like head, continued sleeping, filling half the bed with the abundance of her flesh. He took pleasure, in the obscure daylight that was filtering through the large curtains, in watching her sleep, following the regular oscillations that her regular breathing imparted to the covers, and as she did not wake up, he granted himself another quarter of an hour of inaction, which he employed in organizing his ideas in accordance with his daily method.

  To begin with, the burning memory of Israel and the enormous debt that he had to settle at the end of the month persecuted him. It was the twentieth of November, and of the hundred and ten thousand francs that he had to pay, he only possessed fifty thousand. That money came in part from old debts that he had finally been able to collect by putting pressure on his debtors, threatening them with the bailiff—which had brought thirty thousand francs into his wallet. The other twenty thousand came from the particularly fortunate activity of his operating theater at the beginning of the month, and the fortnightly accounts that had been settled with Soeur Cunégonde, which had brought him four thousand francs.

  General de Rion, having undergone an operation for the “resection of the vas deferens,” and very happy with a temporary amelioration—due as much to the forced rest as to the operation itself—had paid out ten thousand francs without blinking. The farmer’s wife brought by the Vicomtesse de Mesma had increased the sum by four thousand, and the other two thousand francs, completing the fifty thousand, had come from numerous interventions accomplished on petty individuals, poor wretches, more useful to his propaganda and his erudition than to the augmentation of his profits.

  The result was that, by making every effort, he had gathered almost half the sum that he owed Israel—but that was not sufficient, and he wondered anxiously how he was going to confront the rest of his debt, and satisfy the demands of the baleful banker, who had formally declared that he would not renew the debt again, being pressed himself with imperious demands for money.

  The clinic, following the last batch of operations, was empty for the moment, and he did not anticipate being able to fill it up before the end of the month. There would only remain clients of an inferior order, necessitating frequent dressings, and Mademoiselle Romé, newly admitted, for whom there was no question of surgical treatment. At the most, he might have some stroke of luck, some accident of fate bringing invalids to the Avenue Hoche on which operations had to be carried out urgently—but those cases were very rare, and often, the families and the family physicians hesitated to decide immediately on extreme methods, preferring to temporize.

  So, which way could he turn? He had no friends to whom he could reach out, and he wanted to maintain the susceptibility of Madame Bise, one having recourse to her as a last resort. Money-lenders, shady usurers and other dubious businessmen that he had felt out had imposed conditions so draconian that he preferred not to have recourse to them, even to avoid being ruined by Israel. Allowing them to get their teeth into him would only increase the depth of his fall, and another month, by reason of the engagements undertaken, would have seen the edifice that was shaking now, and which a few stones might consolidate, collapse completely. But where could he find the materials to sustain the work, and to what architect ought he to commit himself?

  Again, Armand looked at the calm face of the mistress whose rapacity caused him such anguish. Mathilde continued her slumber, a stranger to the torments that were racking her lover. Under the more exasperated impulsion that a dream imparted to her respiration, her cheeks inflated repeatedly, to relax afterwards with a noise like a bellows emitted between her parted lips. Armand experienced a
momentary resentment against that comfortable insouciance, but it was only a flash, and he quickly began to reflect on the multiple joys that he obtained from her, the satined contact of her majestic body, the intoxication of savant caresses, independent of her sex, with the professional expertise of which she was able to satisfy his monstrous appetites without too much fatigue on her part.

  Nothing sentimental traversed the vibrations of his recollection; it was the carnal gratitude of a hearty eater confronted with a dish with which he has regaled himself and for which he still has an appetite. And a bitterness took hold of him, emanating from the present circumstances, his shortage of money, the supreme struggle he was about to attempt, at the idea that if he were vanquished, he would lose the satiation provided by that woman, that he would be without his habitual outlet for the gross satisfactions of lust.

  Even more than the swallowing of his cash, that perspective tormented him; he must really have been possessed by the power of that flesh to have reached the point of relegating the atavistic joys of money to second place.

  He moved closer to Mathilde, put his arm around her waist and woke her up.

  “It’s you, my wolf! How sleepy I was…can you imagine what I was dreaming?”

  She narrated the banality of the dream. He scarcely listened, dominated by her proximity, by her flesh—but the ringing of the telephone placed in the dressing room next to the bedroom brought him back to reality.

  “Again!” he groaned. “How tiresome. Go and see who is it, my dear. It’s preferable that they don’t recognize me voice. If it’s nothing serious, you’ll put them off, won’t you? Tell them I’m not here…that I have an urgent operation to do.”