All the tarot cards, which Felicité had now laid out, were vying with one another to produce many delightful, crystalline notes, and were providing an extensive though nondescript concert; inclining her ear to compare the talent of each one, she set out to eliminate those whose rhythm betrayed apathy — abruptly reducing them to silence by the simple expedient of holding them upright in her hand. Soon only the liveliest remained in action — then these, in their turn, were gathered up one by one, leaving the whole stage to the House of God, a card whose allegro vivace excelled them all in gaiety and dash.
The powder, endowed with a strange power of penetration, rapidly worked its way into the Sudanese girl’s skin. When the last speck had been absorbed, Canterel made a sign to Felicité, who leaned toward the table and sang a tender, melancholy air right beside the House of God. Interrupting its allegro at once and forsaking all its harmonic combinations, the tarot faultlessly played the murmured melody at full volume, simultaneously in the treble and the bass at an interval of two octaves; it could be transcribed as shown below.
As the first notes sounded, eight luminous emerald-green circles smaller than finger rings appeared horizontally over the tarot card, which had no visible link with them. Like thin halos, they stood at a height of three millimeters above the colored surface, marking the centers of eight imaginary squares of equal size, set in pairs, which would have divided up the whole area of the card symmetrically.
Over and over again Felicité repeated the sixteen bars, drawing in her wake the mysterious and docile performers lurking in the card. The very intense halos gave rise to a powerful green illumination; it seemed as if the melody itself ceaselessly fanned their enigmatic fires, and that they were lit by that alone.
At a brisk word from Canterel, Luc took a sumptuously framed picture from the soft serge bag and set it directly before Sileis’s eyes. The moon magnificently illuminated the canvas, which was signed Vollon and was remarkable in its relief. In an African setting, a young black dancing girl was just performing a dance step in the direction of some savage monarch installed on the right, among his principal chiefs. In perilous independent equilibrium on top of her head and on the flat of her hands she carried three plain baskets, each containing a heavy load of native fruits arranged in a graceful pyramid. The ballerina was terrified by a large red berry falling accidentally from the pile in her left hand, while two Negro executioners rushed toward her in murderous attitudes, grasping their weapons. The whole work had a rare energy, and the expression of terror given to the almeh’s eyes attained a pitch of intensity; but the special talent of the creator of so many still lives showed to advantage above all in the fruit, which leapt out of the canvas, while the runaway berry, halfway to the ground, gleamed a dazzling crimson.
Suddenly a dull groan from Sileis drew our attention to her, as she underwent a terrible crisis. Her bulging, horrified eyes were fixed intently on the picture, and with face convulsed and shallow respiration, she gasped with fright. Canterel, who was watching these abrupt symptoms with evident delight, raised the Sudanese girl’s bare arm to show us that, under the influence of fear, she had very pronounced goose flesh.
With her hands half-closed, Felicité now held the House of God quite level upon the tips of her ten fingers, which were bunched together and slightly curved. The old woman maintained the sparkling vigor of the halos by incessantly singing the same cantilena right beside the musical tarot card, which went over it again and again with her in a continual fortissimo.
Holding it with his two hands held horizontally apart, Canterel ducked his head to peer beneath the arm of Sileis, who still remained just as petrified by the picture. By slowly lowering it, he made the patch of skin that the white powder had recently covered approach a corner halo until the latter just brushed it. Adopting his method of observation, we noticed a deep cavity hollow itself in the skin; without any apparent pain or bleeding, this assumed the form of a cone, of which the brilliant green circle might have formed the base.
Soon, from the apex of this boring, a red globule fell onto the House of God and was greeted by a triumphant exclamation from Canterel, who slightly lifted the Sudanese girl’s arm to move it sideways, a little before lowering it a second time. Not far from the first cavity, which had already shrunk to half its size, a new one gaped over the same halo, in its turn producing a red globule. Many such operations followed one another rapidly. Without going beyond the boundary of the area that Paracelsus’s placet had covered, the professor, adhering to his mysterious procedure, opened cavities here and there in Sileis’s skin, always working with the black arm held constantly parallel to the tarot card by raising it or lowering it in a strictly vertical direction. All the identical cone-shaped depressions closed again gently, leaving no trace, after each one had released a red globule which passed precisely through the center of the same green halo and fell onto the card. Canterel worked hastily, as though making the most of the transient phenomenon of pseudo-death due to the mortal fear still inspired in the Sudanese girl by the appearance of Vollon’s picture. The globules had collected in an oblong heap in the center of the House of God, which still threw itself just as eagerly into the jaunty echoes of the refrain which Felicité perpetually recommenced, while its eight green halos gleamed ever more brightly.
At last Canterel marked the end of the experiment by moving Sileis’s arm aside and at once relinquishing it. No longer seeing the picture, which Luc had quickly returned to its sheath, she became calm again, just as a nervous crisis seemed imminent.
As Felicité had suddenly stopped singing, the tarot card was all at sea and sought in vain to continue its rendering of the cantilena, without a guide. After some fruitless efforts to pick up the thread of the interrupted musical phrase again, it relapsed into its former quaint symphonies, and the halos went out.
As he walked in the direction of the river, Canterel begged us not to allow our eyes to stray a single moment from the cluster of red globules, since he would need us afterward as witnesses. Drawn on by Felicité, we followed him with our eyes obediently fixed on the House of God, which she still held carefully level upon the tips of her ten fingers.
After about fifty paces, we reached the rocks by the riverbank, where, at the professor’s behest, each of us in turn had to verify the total emptiness of a small artificial hollow arranged like a blast hole at the end of a fairly long fuse of German tinder, while the others continued to keep an eye on the globules.
Felicité tipped the House of God (which was thereafter silent) at the right place and in the required place and in the required direction, so as to let the globules roll to the bottom of the tiny cavern. Then Canterel lit the free end of the fuse and prudently drew us back, declaring that an explosion was about to occur, as far as the table we had just left.
There, while the tinder slowly burned, the professor encouraged us to be patient by acquainting us with the following events.
∗ ∗ ∗
One morning, in one of the posh streets of Marseilles, Felicité had seen a flat watch displayed sideways in the window of Frenkel, the great watchmaker. Astonished by the evident presence of a complex mechanism inside a watchcase of negligible thickness, the inventive woman had determined to enrich her performances with a mysterious attraction based on an extreme application of the compressive process; certain tarot cards, which she made use of every day, when once provided internally with thin and quite undetectable musical devices, would provide her fortune-telling sessions with valuable new elements dependent on the character and rhythm of the tunes.
However, so that the music might be attributed to the magical intervention of extraterrestrial powers, as the end in view required, it was necessary that the melody should have a kind of fortuitous irregularity, devoid of any normal passages — and to avoid manipulating a spring that would speedily be detected by the onlookers, who would inevitably be on the alert, it should commence of its own accord. The si
byl thought that only living creatures actually enclosed within the card would provide her with the continually unpredictable execution she desired, combined with an absolute spontaneity of attack.
In a dusty shop five floors below her garret lived the old bookseller Bazire, who used to buy up countless rubbishy books which he would resell second-hand. With an eye to her plan she went to Bazire, with whom she was on neighborly terms, and enquired about a work on insects. The old man handed her several well-illustrated treatises on entomology which she glanced through at her leisure. After some searching she came across a picture of the emerald, the extreme flatness of whose body arrested her attention.
According to the brief text surrounding the drawing, the emerald was an aphanipterous parasite of Caledonian wintergreen, a plant peculiar to Scotland, and was sometimes endowed with an intermittent phosphorescence at night which gave rise to a sort of green halo above it, parallel to the general plane of its body. The insect was white in its natural state, but for as long as the phenomenon of luminosity lasted, the reflection of its nimbus adorned it with a rich shade of emerald which justified its name.
The idea of this aureole fascinated Felicité, for it was doubtless capable of giving forth light in spite of a thin barrier, and its miraculous appearance above some tarot card would furnish her with a basis for making striking augural inferences. So she settled her choice on the emerald, whose shape was precisely adapted to her purpose.
Not knowing where else to turn, Felicité went to Bazire to procure her insects, for she knew that for business reasons he had suppliers of books in every large center. He wrote to his Edinburgh correspondent, who, after obligingly taking the necessary steps, sent her six earthenware pots, each containing a Caledonian wintergreen gathered from the Tay Valley and harbouring a colony of emeralds.
It seemed to the anxious Felicité that only Frenkel, as a master in the art of delicate machinery, would be able to bring the longed-for prodigy to pass; she sounded the watchmaker, who was enthusiastic, and offered his collaboration for free, against the exclusive ownership of the idea, which he wished to exploit afterward himself. The bargain was struck, and Frenkel, who asked for some emeralds to guide him in his work, was given one of the six wintergreens.
One evening, as she was studying the insects on the other five plants, Felicité witnessed the appearance of the promised halo. Its burning green circle sparkled over one of the aphaniptera, accompanying it wherever it went. One by one, all the emeralds adorned themselves with similar aureoles, centered above their heads. It looked as if this general illumination might have been produced by a single cause.
Shading her lamp, the sibyl admired the spectacle of these dazzling rings which intersected one another from various sides, giving a subdued light which transmitted its own tint to the little creatures’ white bodies. A few minutes later all the nimbuses went out one by one.
As his first model, Frenkel successfully completed a wholly metallic rectangle of negligible thickness, symmetrically divided into eight similar squares aligned in twos, all with emeralds installed at their centers. Each leg, as it stretched to make a movement, was subject to the grip of a tiny metal gaiter soldered to a rod, which worked a system of wheels lying flat in the general plane of the object. The finely toothed bosses and rims were fitted together in series so as to make each wheel gain in power what it lost in speed; the first, set in motion directly by the rod, was easily turned by the movements of the imprisoned leg, while the last one, slow and sturdy, with a series of spikes fixed in its boss, every now and then pressed the tip of a pointed tongue, which vibrated with a purer tone when released. As every individual was endowed with six legs each producing one note, the eight emeralds between them filled the following interval, comprising four major sevenths:
In addition, there was a marvelous restraining system of inextricable wheelwork, constructed with the assistance of a competent harmonist, which controlled the eight zones separately and as a whole, and prevented any discords from arising, without excluding any rational and analyzable combination. The instrument was like a miniature version of the componium† at the Brussels Conservatory.
At the slightest deviation from the horizontal, a tiny mobile weight would paralyse every component of the apparatus; Felicité had insisted on this beforehand, for she was anxious to keep her performance free from any premature music originating from the tarot cards as they stood upright in their box.
Transformed into a sheath, by means of a slender blade inserted into one of its short edges in order to dig out its whole thickness, a tarot card comfortably incorporated the metal rectangle without changing its appearance or showing the slightest trace of a crack in the side which gave it entrance. Frenkel made copies of this model and soon all the tarot cards were undetectable sheaths, each having its musical plate containing eight emeralds, which slipped effortlessly in or out.
The artistic results, in their unassailable purity, had the required quality of unexpectedness. The halos would often shine above one of the cardboard surfaces undeterred by the obstacle, their presence being evidently due to some intimate auditory pleasure in the performers, for they always marked the best passages in the concert.
Through the good offices of Felicité, all the insects were requisitioned in turn — then released on the six plants where they found the necessities of life.
The sibyl had great success with her musical tarot cards, which she employed in her evening sessions so as to have the benefit of their green nimbuses. Whatever musical style the emeralds might adopt, the old woman, with her gift of the gab, derived from it ingenious corollaries to the prediction already furnished by the actual face of the card. Whenever the aureoles supervened, she eagerly seized upon the new and fertile theme which they suddenly offered for her prophetic zeal. Combined with the completely normal appearance of the tarot cards, the mystery of these spontaneous symphonies and gleaming aerial crowns made a great impression on the curious public, whose numbers began to grow.
Felicité noticed a certain characteristic melody in F major which the emeralds would often approximate in the course of their improvisations, vainly striving to pursue it as though haunted by some memory. Scarcely had the first card been dealt one evening, when an English tourist who was mingled with the usual crowd heard the strange, perplexing motif and recognized it as the beginning of a cantilena from beyond the Channel, which he then sang from start to finish. Following his voice — in the soprano and bass registers simultaneously — to accompany him in the tune for which they had so often striven, they created vivid halos whose hitherto unrivalled intensity seemed to betray a gladness arising from the cessation of distress. Surprised at being copied in this way, the Englishman, without halting his song, inclined his ear toward the card, so as to listen better to the sounds. When he straightened up again, Felicité was taken aback to see eight funnel-shaped cavities in the skin of his ear and cheek which, in view of their symmetrical arrangement, seemed to be the halos’ doing; they closed again without his knowledge, leaving no trace. On being questioned by the crowd, the Englishman identified the tune as a Scottish folk song entitled “The Bluebells of Scotland.”
When she recalled that the emeralds came from Scotland, Felicité’s curiosity was aroused; she bore the attestation in mind and next day passed it on to Bazire, to whom she recounted the whole adventure.
At her entreaty the bookseller addressed a special list of questions to his colleague in Edinburgh, from whom he soon received a great deal of circumstantial information together with a copy of “The Bluebells of Scotland” that had been requested. The six Caledonian wintergreens had been culled on the very banks of the Tay, in a locality abounding in rich pastures, in the vicinity of a stone bench where a young herdsman used to sit, playing the bagpipes as he watched his herds from afar. The young man’s favorite air, “The Bluebells of Scotland” — in its original key of F major — had permeated the emeralds, and when a mus
ical ability was later bestowed on them, they had made every effort to pick out the tune lying dormant in their memory, until the day they had rediscovered the complete work thanks to a guide. Their joy, expressed at the time by the extreme intensification of each aureole, was to be attributed to the exhilarating, though temporary, evocation of their cold native clime, which no doubt, in a new environment that was too mild for them, inspired them with some nostalgic regrets.
Haunted by the most impressive feature of the incident of the English tourist, Felicité learnt the tune of “The Bluebells of Scotland” by heart herself and sang it in the key of F to the emeralds, who then promptly played it after her in the bass and treble simultaneously. In this way she obtained blinding halos at will, which mysteriously and painlessly produced hollows in the skin of her hands when they were exposed above them. The original key was conducive to the unanimous splendor of the halos, by enabling all the eight emeralds of a single tarot card to be active at once.
At her performances, when she intoned the melody in the form of an incantation, she would employ for her prophetic purposes not only the luminous intensity of the nimbuses but also the enigmatic temporary appearance of the cavities in her hand, making her predictions depend on their depth, or the way in which they closed up again.
Only the halos produced by “The Bluebells of Scotland” had the power to broach the skin, and the insects were never able to sing this without a leader.
The very presence of the nimbuses, and above all their secret perforating ability, aroused Canterel’s curiosity; he resolved to make a close study of the emeralds, which received scant mention in the books, and had escaped the serious attention of naturalists.
One evening, while he was examining a halo through a kind of watchmaker’s lens fixed in his eye — and Felicité was successfully humming “The Bluebells of Scotland” in her aged voice — he discovered two almost insubstantial cones of light which turned rapidly in opposite directions and remained balancing upright with their bases joined — with one vertex upon the head of one of the insects and the other in the air. The lower cone was uniformly blue, the upper one entirely yellow.
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