Once a clown was completed, he had marble copies made of it for commercial purposes, in which the linear outline did not appear at all, for after all it was only an aid in modeling. However it was a potent aid, and its importance led Jerjeck to conclude that without it he would never have attained complete mastery. So the artist was grateful to the chance occurrence that had once brought into his hands a little of this nocturnal wax, whose occasional snow-white flecks on a black ground had irresistibly prompted him to sculpt with lines forming the exact negative of the similarly very white drawing by which he was guided; his reputation owed an extra layer of brilliance to the pridiana vidua presented, one memorable day, in the botany class.
Soon Jerjeck sent Barioulet three exultant marble clowns, made in stages following his usual method. The style of the reply amused him, for the rough and practical mind of the former businessman, whom fortune had not refined, showed through. Bariolet had written to him: “I am pleased with your three clowns and commission one gross ditto from you, each in a different pose.”
These words, “One gross ditto,” alluding to works of art renowned for their delicate perfection, made Jerjeck burst out laughing and, as soon as he had finished reading the letter, he set to work on the first of the one hundred and forty-four clowns required. Polge, who was then engaged in modeling a few paces away, heard his master, who had read the letter to him, saying from time to time, shaken by a sudden hilarity: “One gross ditto!”
This short phrase above all, gaily uttered by the corpse, had enabled Polge to identify the scene reproduced, which was in fact none other than the one that Barioulet’s letter had provoked.
The dead Jerjeck, provided with the exact implements he had employed in the past, made a clown, first on the scraper board then in nocturnal wax, identical to that produced during the relevant minutes of his life. The experiment was repeated and each time proved to be conclusive as regards the extraordinary delicacy of the work created in this way.
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6. The sensitive writer, Claude Le Calvez, who, shortly before his end — knowing himself to be afflicted by a hopeless disease of the stomach and neurotically terrified by the approach of death — had personally asked to be accommodated as he wished in the ice house at Locus Solus, when he had drawn his final breath; for the thought of continuing to act after the great and dreaded moment comforted him a little in his despair on the threshold of oblivion. When that hour struck, it was observed that the dead man’s behavior related to a treatment he had recently followed.
The previous year, a famous practitioner, Doctor Sirhugues, had discovered a way of generating a kind of blue light which, though it possessed very little brilliance, contained wonderful therapeutic powers. Concentrated by an enormous lens, it had the property of rapidly reinvigorating any invalid stripped and exposed, whether by day or night, to its mysterious rays.
Placed at the lens’s focus, the patient, seized by a crazy excitement and suffering all over from a cruel burning pain, did his utmost to escape. So he was closely confined in a kind of cylindrical cage with strong bars which, being erected precisely in the prescribed spot, received the name of “focal jail.”
The handling of the strange light was still uncertain, making it supremely dangerous; being scarcely visible to the eye and resisting all photometric procedures, it might well have killed the unruly prisoner in the event of a sudden, fortuitous and unsuspected burst from the apparatus producing it. Since any mark, drawn upon any surface whatsoever and placed near the focus of the lens, was quickly effaced by its terrible contact, Sirhugues considered that some already ancient engraving that had proved itself exceptionally resistant might be placed inside the jail, when required, to fulfil the function of a warning signal. After active searching, he found something that answered his requirements in an antique shop — a map of Lutetia printed on silk, which, dating back to the reign of Charles III, the Simple, was the outcome of a touching event.
One day, while visiting one of the poorest quarters of Lutetia, near the north-west section of the city wall, Charles III had quivered with disgust at the inextricable maze of dark and fetid alleys.
On returning to his palace he demanded a plan of the city, then, with a thick stroke of his pen, drew a perfectly straight line through the quarter in question, and so as better to attract attention, he extended the two ends of this line with the appearance of a secant, beyond the city walls, which at this point formed a regular curve. In order to improve the sanitation of this sad corner which, for lack of light and air, was rife with disease, the command was given for a spacious avenue to be pierced, exactly following the indication provided by the intra-mural part of the line.
Next day, Charles III had the map, with its mark of promise, displayed in the center of the quarter concerned, so that the inhabitants might rejoice beforehand. Those who suffered from the demolitions received compensation, and the work was accomplished.
When about a third of the work was done, an impoverished engraver named Yvikel, who lived in an alley darker and fouler than all the rest, suddenly saw the sun and breeze flood into his house, the façade of which happened to be in the line of the new avenue.
Now Yvikel was a widower with no one in the world but his only daughter Blandine, an adolescent with a delicate constitution, who for a year had been declining from day to day, pale and shaken by coughs and chained by weakness to her bed. Working himself to a shadow to pay for care and medicine, Yvikel had resolved that after the death of his child, who was his only reason for living, he would kill himself — when the intoxicating transformation of his dwelling made him conceive the hope that she might be cured.
It was early spring. Blandine’s bed was dragged to the open window where she reveled in the sunshine and oxygen, wild with delight. With tears of happiness, her father saw her regain her strength and complexion, while the attacks became fewer and further between. The victory was complete just as the avenue was finished.
Delirious with joy, Yvikel determined to testify his gratitude to the King whose praiseworthy work had been the cause of his great happiness, by paying him a divine tribute.
At that time it was the custom, whenever some wonderful cure had been obtained as a result of prayers in a certain quarter, to have printed on silk — parchment being reserved exclusively for religious texts — an artless design in which the author of the miracle, with haloed head, stretched forth his potent hand toward the pillow of the dear one saved from death. Once framed, the work served as an ex-voto and went to swell some group of its fellows, of which there were masses everywhere adorning the altars of Jesus, the Virgin and the saints. Yvikel, who was very skilled in his art and had several times been commissioned to execute ex-votos of this kind, proposed to offer one of the King.
Like the haloed figures in the silk prints, who stretched forth an arm toward the bed of suffering, Charles III had clearly performed his healing gesture when he created the thoroughfare with an inflexible pen stroke; to conform to custom, this had to be evoked.
Using the best ink, Yvikel lavished much time and care upon the design, on silk, of a map of Lutetia inspired by the original still displayed in the very heart of the quarter, making a secant cross it in the appropriate place. Then he had the work framed and sent it to the King, explaining his action in an enthusiastic letter, in which he gave an account of his daughter’s cure and set down its cause at length.
Charles III was touched; he settled a pension on Yvikel and had the letter fixed to the back of the ex-voto, so that part of it could be read behind a plate of glass.
Now, after so many centuries the map and the secant still remained surprisingly clear, due to the exceptionally painstaking execution of the design, as well as the special choice of ink and the use of silk, which is a material better fitted than any other to receive and retain an image without fading.
Removing the letter from the object so as to read it in full, Si
rhugues became acquainted with its story, then did some research to complete his investigations.
He placed the map in the focal jail several times, and saw it successfully resist the onslaughts of the blue light. Though it was imperceptible to the naked eye, a slight fading of the lines was nevertheless produced, showing that the powerful emanations did have a certain hold on it all the same; so it was certain that if there were any sudden effervescence of the luminous source the work would quickly fade, thus signaling the danger.
Sirhugues derived great benefit from Yvikel’s experience, in which everything had combined to induce the honest engraver, armed with skills that have since been lost, to take the exceptional pains mentioned in his letter to the King in designing this wonderfully durable print on silk, so useful now in the working of the focal jail.
For each session Sirhugues needed, in addition, a less permanent engraving whose progressive obliteration would make it possible for him to regulate his current.
From among all the copies printed off in a single batch, on the same day and in the same manner, only those remaining in good condition after the test of a full half-century at least would be capable of giving him consistent indications.
Being very much at a loss to find some numerous edition from the past that was neither dispersed nor destroyed, he had his desideratum appear as an announcement in various specialist periodicals — and soon received a visit from Louis-Jean Soum, the noted publisher of engravings, who brought him a thousand copies of a caricature of Nourrit, dating from 1834.
Early in that year the renowned singer had won great celebrity by unstintingly bestowing the tremendous timbre of his voice upon his beautiful interpretation of Aeneas at the Opéra. In the third act, Aeneas, amid rocks, leaning against a kind of well that was to conduct him to the nether regions, hailed Charon with several “hoos,” each higher and louder than the last. The final one was very shrill and, by the composer’s cunning foresight, gave Nourrit a chance to sing that famous high C of his, renowned throughout Europe. Now this note, followed by an outburst of applause, was the star turn of each performance and made it much talked about.
Josolyne, one of the foremost caricaturists of the day, decided to exploit the vogue for this transcendent sound. He drew a cartoon in which the celebrated high C was seen to emerge from Nourrit’s mouth, as he leaned toward Hades, and attain the nadir after spreading throughout the earth. By this Josolyne meant to indicate that the celebrated note would resound as far as the stellar regions, taking any obstacle in its stride.
The firm of Soum, then owned by Louis-Jean’s great-grandfather, printed off a thousand copies of the work, which was to be sold, with the programme, at each performance of Aeneas.
Josolyne offered the original to Nourrit and told him of his plans, certain that he would be flattered by such a glorification of his voice. But the tenor, also known for his violent and capricious temper, saw only the burlesque side of the work and tore it up in irritation, disgusted at being made ridiculous in this way. Furthermore, he expressly opposed the publication of the thousand reproductions.
Josolyne, who was easy-going by nature, took his decision in the matter philosophically and settled with the engraver, requesting to keep the unlucky edition by him in case it should one day be possible to put it into circulation.
Shortly afterward, Josolyne disappeared suddenly one evening, leaving no clue by which he might be traced. Thirty-five years later he was considered legally dead, and his testamentary wishes were executed.
Louis-Jean’s great grandfather, by then an octogenarian, was officially informed that the ill-fated edition, which had formerly remained unsold, had been left without reservations to him — but out of scrupulousness he peremptorily decreed that neither he nor his successors should allow themselves to touch what could, after all, continue to be only a trust as long as definite proof of the illustrious caricaturist’s death was lacking. Under Louis-Jean’s grandfather, then under his father, nothing had occurred.
Now lately, during the demolition of an old house in one of the meaner quarters of Paris, a fully clothed corpse — easily identifiable thanks to the name inscribed by the tailor upon each garment — had been found walled into a recess in the cellar.
It was the body of Josolyne, who was a neuropathic, bohemian artist, very fond of dissolute orgies to which he would imprudently abandon himself wearing jewelry, and with his wallet in his pocket. On the evening of his disappearance he must have let himself be enticed by a girl into a den where robbery and death awaited him. Since the crime was covered by this explanation, no inquest was held.
Louis-Jean was henceforth free, without reservation, to dispose of the edition that had lain so long neglected. He was still wondering how it might be turned to account when Sirhugues’s notice had caught his eye and determined his course of action.
Sirhugues brought the stock without haggling, enchanted by the rare windfall, which he owed at once to Nourrit’s touchy disposition, the mystery that had so long enshrouded Josolyne’s disappearance and the excessively scrupulous honesty of Soum.
Eight hundred and sixteen copies, of an identical shade, remained to him after the elimination of those whose originally undetectable inferiority had been revealed by irreplaceable time undertaking to perform its indispensable office by making them fade.
It was decided that, at the beginning of each session, one caricature of Nourrit should be placed in the focal jail and sacrificed to the difficult task of regulating the current, which Sirhugues would in turn reduce or step up, according to what signs he observed of haste or slowness in the work’s disappearance.
Next, Sirhugues cast about for the best expedient to ensure that, during each of the sick man’s confinements within the cylindrical grille and despite the turbulent activity which possessed even the calmest within it, the map of Lutetia and the astronomical cartoon should always directly face the blue light — without the possibility of their being shadowed, even temporarily, by the patient, to the detriment of their function, nor casting their shadow upon him to the prejudice of the treatment.
After long deliberation he had a strange helmet made for the patient, surmounted by a pivoting needle from which the two engravings were to hang nakedly exposed, without permitting even the barrier of a protective sheet of glass. So as to maintain the required tension, the copy of the caricature that happened to be selected took its place each time within a new frame which, since it had been manufactured to very specific instructions, was just heavy enough to balance the needle perfectly. This frame was provided with two hooks for suspension, as also was the one for the map of Lutetia. An attentive man wielding a magnet intelligently beside the jail could, without even touching the needle, make it preserve its correct orientation in spite of everything. As a result of this set of contrivances, the two engravings always remained facing the blue radiation without any mutual risk of them and the sick man casting shadows upon each other. A mirror, conveniently positioned, and turned in the right direction, enabled the person handling the photogenic apparatus to watch both engravings despite the obstacle of the lens.
It was then that the wretched Claude Le Calvez had been brought to Sirhugues, in the hope that a vigorous external tonic might for a while replace the nourishment which had already become, in his case, almost impossible. Daily sessions in the focal jail did in fact restore some sinew to the poor doomed man and delay his death by several weeks.
Now during his first incarceration, Le Calvez had shown signs of intense excitement, which had diminished little by little in the course of subsequent trials. And it was the agonizing minutes of this initial session — from the moment when he had been brought before the focal jail on a stretcher, filled with apprehension — which, because of the deep agitation they had caused in him, artificially saw again the light of day.
Sirhugues learnt of this fact, which gave him an idea. He determined to see whether the b
lue light could have any regenerative effect on the sickly body endowed by Canterel with artificial life — and he came for this purpose on behalf of his deceased client, who was himself ready in the appointed place, just like an ordinary patient. He even retained the precaution connected with the map of Lutetia, so as to prevent any possibility of photogenic deterioration in the corpse. From his special point of view the outcome was negative, but in the hope of future results he persisted in multiplying the trials.
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7. A young beauty from across the Channel, accompanied by her husband, the wealthy Lord Alban Exley, an English peer; out of affection for the departed woman, he had been eager to see her reborn for a moment at his side, but when his desire was fulfilled, certain tragic aspects of the moment relived had wrung his heart.
Being poor, Ethelfleda Exley’s marriage had been a love match. Once a lady and wife of a peer, money and titles had gone to the head of this flighty woman and she had never given a thought, since her marriage, to anything except the vaunted perfection of her physical person and its adornment.
In particular, imitating the most elegant women in London, she had adopted a recent fashion of tinning the fingernails in a certain way, which created a kind of sparkling little mirror at each fingertip, much more effective than any form of polishing.
After complete local anesthesia, the inventor of the process, a skillful practitioner, would employ a special nostrum to separate the flesh from the nail, whose inner surface he tinned before fixing it again firmly with the aid of a second product compounded by himself. The tin used, cunningly made semi-transparent, left the half-moons white, though less so than in their normal state; and all the rest, except the part reserved for the scissors, it left with its subdued shade of pink. As the nail grew it was necessary for the inventor to unfix it again from time to time, so as to tin a thin new strip at its base.
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