In utter despair, Roland realized all his property and paid the eight hundred thousand pounds to Ruscassier, who was obliged to share it with Quentin.
Roland, with his family, retired in poverty to the little town of Souvigny, where he devoted himself more zealously than ever to the study of science, teaching physics and chemistry to earn a living.
While seeking the cause of it, the ex-castellan was often intrigued by the memory of the pain he had experienced in the nape of his neck, for the first time in his life, at the terrible moment when the word “cob” had fallen from Ruscassier’s lips. By repeating, with the same extraordinary abruptness, the head movement he had then made, he managed now and then to inflict the mysterious pain in question upon himself. But it very often happened that, despite all the violence he put into it, the spasm remained painless. At length Roland discovered that the presence or absence of the pain depended on which point of the compass he was facing. After numerous further experiments he was forced at last, despite the stubborn resistance of his reason, to admit the following incredible conclusion: no matter where he might be, whether in an open or enclosed spot, the feeling appeared whenever he faced north and suddenly twisted his head either to east or west — whilst when the initial orientation was toward any other cardinal point his most rapid cephalic pivotings were without effect.
Roland remembered that, sure enough, a certain north-facing window in a cant wall had been just in front of him at the time of Ruscassier’s fatal visit, and that the latter had been standing on his right.
The pain, which consisted of a large number of localized tingling sensations, evidently had its origin in the multitudinous magnetic points that formed the monogram on his neck. Pondering the method by which Oberthur had once implanted them, Roland realized that the tiny needles were set in his skin at right angles to a plane passing through both his shoulders when he held himself erect. The knowledge of this fact, combined with his countless observations, led him to a hypothesis resulting from his meditations and inquiries which, though he found its inadmissible strangeness repellent, triumphantly imposed itself as the only one to square with all the facts: the magnetic tips of the needles were being subjected to a mysterious attraction toward the north. When Roland positioned himself facing north, the points pulled directly forward; as soon as a brutal movement of his neck dragged them elsewhere, they opposed a degree of resistance from which the painful tingling sensation was derived, being naturally absent in any other case.
Roland had correctly unraveled the real cause of his capricious pain. Nevertheless, his notions as a man of the twelfth century made him debate timidly within himself against the excessive boldness and novelty of a truth which at that time was unheard of; but as it grew ever more certain in his mind, it enraptured him with the sense of having made a wonderful discovery and pervaded him with secret joy.
To test the accuracy of his theory, he filled a vessel with water and placed a long magnetic needle across two small straws floating parallel upon its surface, so that it then had full freedom to maneuver. Dazzled by the importance of his discovery and glimpsing its sublime consequences for shipping, Roland was able to verify, with palpitating heart, that in whatever direction the needle might be displaced, it always returned and stayed fixed toward the north.
His stupendous invention, capable of bring about such great advances in navigation, of saving so many human lives from the waves and of leading to the discovery of so many astonishing lands as yet unknown, was taken by him to Louis VII. The enraptured sovereign rewarded him with a fortune.
Aboard every ship from then on, there was a magnetic needle which showed the north, supported by two straws floating on the water of a half-filled flask. This primitive instrument, called a marinette* was the ancestor of the true compass, which did not appear, fitted with a compass dial, until three centuries later.
Having repurchased his castle and become wealthy again, Roland began to bless the strange circumstances of his disaster, without which he would never have made his immortal discovery. Indeed, it was only a fantastically sudden head movement that would provoke the pain in his neck. Now, to give rise to such vigor fortuitously required nothing less than the announcement, to an untroubled soul, of its complete and final ruin. By an odd concatenation of events, hearing the monosyllable “cob” had plunged the confident and ironical Roland, at a single stroke, into the depths of the darkest abyss. A longer word would perhaps have rendered the psychic phenomenon, and consequently the famous turning of the head, less instantaneous, and thus incapable of producing the telltale pain.
As for the two accomplices, Ruscassier and Quentin, they had soon been reduced to poverty by gaming and carousing and imprisoned for fresh crimes.
From this material the playwright Eustache Miécaze had produced a lively play. In a prologue, the learned Oberthur drew up the horoscope of the newborn Roland, held by his father — then, explaining its secrets and its aim, made preparations for the sub-occipital operation, which commenced only as the curtain fell. Next there were five acts situated a quarter of a century later, in which the tragic adventure of the blank document was portrayed in the minutest detail, together with its consequences, baneful at first, but in the end glorious.
Wearing a low-necked costume that exposed the internal stellar monogram in dark gray on his neck — actually due to a little external make-up — Lauze had often, and with great success, played the part of Roland — a complex character in turn redolent of peaceful uxorious happiness with his wife and sons, reeling under the blow of his disaster, courageous in misfortune, obsessed by the gestation of his great discovery, and in the end reveling in his well-earned fame.
After his death he factitiously reenacted the most outstanding episode of the play, that in which the word “cob,” pronounced by Ruscassier holding the note of hand, indirectly causes that pain at the back of his neck, so pregnant with enduring consequences for the world.
An extra, taking the part of Ruscassier, was careful to pronounce the latter of the two syllables constituting his reply at exactly the right moment, so that the celebrated head movement should have the proper air of resulting from it, and every means — properties and sets, accurate costumes and special make-up for the corpse’s neck — were employed to produce in the actor’s daughter, whose devotion and enthusiasm knew no bounds, the illusion of seeing her father once more tread the boards.
∗ ∗ ∗
4. A seven-year-old child, Hubert Scellos, carried off by typhoid. His mother, a young widow henceforth alone in the world and beset by thoughts of suicide, only deferred the execution of her tragic plans in order to give herself the bitter joy of seeing her son’s corpse momentarily unstiffen with deceptive life.
The wretched woman was poignantly moved when she found that the moments relived by the child were those during which he had sat upon her knee gazing tenderly at her and reciting Ronsard’s Virelai cousu to wish her many happy returns of her last birthday.
In this absolutely perfect work — a pathetic hymn of filial love in which a little bird is imagined to address its mother, praising the benefits it continually receives — the poet manages to express his ideas with great force, by the lapidary precision with which he fits the words together. Now in the sixteenth century the terms cousu and décousu† were both applied to style, whether marmoreal or free, though in our day only the latter term still preserves its figurative sense. Hence the admiring appellation which the people, of their own accord, bestowed on the famous virelay under discussion, when it appeared, as being a masterpiece of conciseness and coherence.
So much density and studied elegance made the verses difficult to retain, and Hubert Scellos had made the strenuous and obsessive efforts to get them all into his head, which explained why they were remembered post vitam.
The gracious dead boy had acquitted himself of this recitation faultlessly, combining the appropriate intonation with well-understoo
d and delivered gestures. Nothing was required for the set but an ordinary chair — upon which the poor mother, refusing to entertain the idea of anyone else replacing her, used to come and sit, warmly wrapped up, to offer him the haven of her lap and thus experience a more complete illusion of happiness.
∗ ∗ ∗
5. The sculptor Jerjeck who, on dying suddenly without any family, had been brought along by a young man named Jacques Polge, his assiduous pupil and fervent admirer.
Bearing in mind the ten long hours a day that Jerjeck had devoted, from time immemorial, to his one consuming passion, his work, Polge went armed with many probabilities and had every reason to hope the corpse might relive some minutes of creative activity above any others. If the event proved him right, he was curious to know whether his teacher, whose talent entirely resided in the utmost delicacy of detail, would execute the same miraculous work in death as during his lifetime.
Canterel saw this as an interesting means of demonstrating, in a particularly conclusive manner, the perfect exactitude with which the reconstituted slices of life imitated their originals.
As everything had tended to predict, the corpse did indeed relive some moments of toil under the practiced eye of Polge, who was then induced to make various facts known to Canterel.
Six months before, in Paris, Jerjeck had received a visit from a man named Barioulet, a nouveau-riche businessman from Toulouse. The latter, having remained a bachelor until he was fifty, was to marry, after a still unspecified period, a local girl who had found his large fortune attractive. Like any quinquagenarian flustered by a young girl, the businessman was very much in love and wished, on the occasion of his marriage, to give each of his friends some valuable and enduring memento that was to perpetuate indefinitely the memory of a supremely important date by which his whole life was illuminated.
Jewelry, if not lost, becomes unfashionable, breaks or gets sold off when one is tired of looking at it. In Barioulet’s view only a work of art, signed by a famous name, had a chance, slight perhaps but anyway attainable, of remaining intact in some family through many generations. Jerjeck, being eminently renowned and specializing in the creation of marble clowns only centimeters high, seemed to him the man to receive his commission.
It was agreed that the artist should execute three different marble clowns, exceedingly joyous and mirthful insofar as they were to evoke a day of passionate felicity. These, if they satisfied Barioulet, were to be followed by a host of others in the same style — waiting for the momentous date to be graven on each plinth, as soon as it was fixed. As soon as the man from Toulouse had left, Jerjeck set to work employing peculiar methods, the habit of which he had acquired in childhood.
Jerjeck had grown up far from any hearth, as a poor orphan whose uncles, upon whom he depended, had clubbed together and made great sacrifices to pay for his board at a Parisian lycée. The greatest joys of his childhood were the prolonged visits made to the museums, in a party, on rainy Sundays. The next day, after these blessed occasions, he would attempt to reproduce some picture from memory by drawing it in his exercise book, or some statue in a lump of stale bread white misappropriated from his ration of bread.
At the Louvre one day, his eyes were riveted by Watteau’s Gilles, which he afterward worked furiously to reproduce from memory. But no sketch satisfied him. Correctly attributing his disappointments to the inconveniently small number of pen strokes required by the powdered personage’s overall whiteness, which created a serious problem, he thought of an expedient calculated to give him the illusion, at least, of a more substantial task.
He blackened a whole page with ink — then, when it was dry, used his scraper to make his clown appear in one corner by elimination.
This method proved successful right away, so greatly was he inspired by the progressive appearance on the dark ground of the fascinating white areas that composed his subject. Then, diverging from the original, he bestrewed the black page with innumerable scraped clowns, varying their pose and expression according to his fancy.
Instinctively feeling that a fruitful avenue had just opened at his feet, he diligently contrived thereafter, scraper in hand, to execute a mass of sketches of the same personage seen from various angles, upon amply stained paper. With the rare vestiges of ink left on the milk-white surface by his blade, he managed to obtain an astonishing range of expressions.
After attempting to model clowns in bread, he seemed to see a burst of illumination suffusing his whole life. Sculpture, which he had always preferred to drawing, made the mysterious abilities given him by his favorite subject blossom even further. The sculpting of clowns, he felt, would bring him fame and fortune.
But how was he to progress with only bread for clay and his fingers for tools — and without even a penny to get himself anything better?
Each week he used to attend a botany lesson given by Brothelande, a parsimonious bachelor settled in the suburbs and extremely devoted to his science, who put all the superfluous proceeds from his salary and lessons toward the cultivation of unusual plants under glass. Finding that even the best engravings were not clear enough for his demonstrations, he would often, regardless of the inconvenience, personally transport from his home to the school, some rare specimen that was to be the subject of his lesson.
One day, in front of Jerjeck and his companions, he unwrapped a pridiana vidua (widow of yesterday) in order to give them a lengthy dissertation on this large Annamite flower resembling the tulip in shape, which owes its sad name, suggestive of bereavement, to its white stamens and black petals.
The pridiana vidua is chiefly remarkable for the bottom of its corolla, which secretes a black wax containing numerous white granules — called “nocturnal wax” on account of its resemblance to the starry firmament.
After showing the whole class this wax from the height of his rostrum, by bending the flower forward, Brothelande took a small quantity of it upon the point of a paper knife, declaring that it slowly formed again after each removal; this passed from hand to hand so that the pupils were able to study the fascinating soft substance at close range and handle it. When his turn came, Jerjeck was suddenly struck by the exceptional malleability which it possessed.
Brothelande was pleased to see how the pridiana vidua had quite captivated his young listeners, and he promised to give the exotic flower, which was easy to nurse for a long time in its pot, to the boy who came top in the very next test paper.
Thinking of the giant strides a lump of nocturnal wax would enable him to make in his art, Jerjeck had only one aim: to win the flower. By dint of working incessantly at his botany course, while neglecting all other homework or lessons at the risk of being often punished, he came out top in the test in question — and received the pridiana vidua from Brothelande’s hands.
Jerjeck watered the flower punctually and looked after it, and, until it died, applied himself to collecting the sooty wax at intervals from the corolla, where it was always renewed. In the end he had a considerable mass of it, which in its softness and docility proved, from the very first trial, to be the answer to his prayers.
Since he aimed at an extreme delicacy of execution that the makeshift instruments originating from his pencil box were unable to give, it occurred to him that, although his bread was inadequate as clay, he might, at all events, use it to fashion with his fingers chisels of infinitely varied and precise forms which, once hard, could be put to use.
In practice his idea was most successful. Armed with thoroughly staled tools of his own design, he made a humorous and lively clown from his lump of wax, based on the latest drawing produced by his strange process. Feeling himself a fair way on toward success, he spent all his free time sculpting his subject in a thousand guises; he would begin by delineating the attitude, features and expression of each statuette with the aid of a white silhouette made by the scraper on an ink ground, which inspired him to fruitful discoveries. As soo
n as a work was finished, he would roll the wax between his hands into a smooth ball ready to be used again.
Jerjeck soon came to attach increasing importance to his strange preliminary work on paper, noticing that he definitely derived his most brilliant ideas from it. He made two very elaborate studies of each clown, front and back, which guided him step by step in the modeling — and he even, almost unwillingly, acquired the habit of reproducing in the soft black statue’s surface the evocative ink strokes left so talentedly upon the sheet by his amazing scraper, by making fine lines out of certain white granules in the nocturnal wax – instinctively finding this a singular help in his sculpting task. Thus the work, once completed, formed the exact negative, in a way, of the clown whose positive was provided in the double drawing. When the surface granules happened to be lacking, Jerjeck would dig some underlying ones out of the very thickness of the wax; when, on the other hand, they were too abundant, he would push in and cover up those unusable ones which would have hindered his creation of some uniform expanse of virgin black.
For Jerjeck this plastico-linear procedure was most fertile in immense results — and finally led him to create exquisite masterpieces which, the artist felt, might not have attained the same degree of perfection without it.
Thus, without teachers, the young Jerjeck developed a magnificent talent, to which he owed his instant success once his studies were over.
Now, despite various attempts, he could never change his original working methods. Only a double scraper-board drawing would properly illustrate the genesis of each of his clowns, and he preferred his bread tools to the unvarying range of chisels offered by the dealers, since, according to his needs, he could give them thousands of ever-new shapes capable of meeting his most elaborate requirements — and they quickly became hard enough. As for the nocturnal wax, which a horticulturist supplied him with to order, because of the natural occurrence of white specks in its black mass, it lent itself more conveniently than any other material to the clear and striking delineation of the strokes copied from the original.
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