Her first lady-in-waiting was quite touched thereby, and exclaimed with admiration: “I recognize the blood of my kings.” Boulingrin woke up beside the Duchess de Cicogne at the same time as the Princess and all her household. As he rubbed his eyes, his mistress said: “Boulingrin, you have been asleep.” “Not at all, dear lady, not at all.” He spoke in good faith. Having slept without dreaming for a hundred years, he did not know that he had been asleep.
“I have been so little asleep,” he said, “that I can repeat what you said a minute ago.”
“Well, what did I say?”
“You said, ‘I suspect a dark intrigue.’”
As soon as it awoke, the whole of the little Court was discharged; every one had to fend for himself as best he could.
Boulingrin and Cicogne hired from the castle steward an old seventeenth-century trap drawn by an animal which was already very aged before it went to sleep for a hundred years, and drove to the station of Eaux-Perdues, where they caught a train which, in two hours, deposited them in the capital of the country. Great was their surprise at all that they saw and heard. But by the end of a quarter of an hour they had exhausted their astonishment, and nothing surprised them any more. As for themselves, nobody took the slightest interest in them. Their story was perfectly incomprehensible, and awakened no curiosity, for our minds are not interested in anything that is too obvious, or too difficult to follow.
As one may well believe, Boulingrin had not the remotest idea what had happened to him. But when the Duchess said that it was not natural, he answered:
“Dear lady, allow me to observe that you have been badly trained in physics. Nothing exists which is not according to Nature.”
There remained to them neither friends, relations, nor property. They could not identify the position of their house. With the little money they had they bought a guitar, and sang in the streets. By this means they gained sufficient to support themselves. At night Cicogne staked at manille, in the inns, the coppers that had been thrown her during the day, while Boulingrin, with a bowl of warm wine in front of him, explained to the company that it was ridiculous to believe in fairies.
THE SHIRT
“It was only a young shepherd, listlessly reclining upon the grass of the meadow, and beguiling his solitude by the notes of a pipe. His clothes had been forcibly removed, but...” (Grand Dictionnaire, de Pierre Larousse, article “Chemise,” t. IV, p. 5, col. 4).
CHAPTER I. KING CHRISTOPHE, HIS GOVERNMENT, HIS HABITS AND HIS MALADY
CHRISTOPHE V was not a bad king.
He minutely observed the rules of Parliamentary government, and he never opposed the will of the Chambers. This submission did not cost him very much, for he had observed that while there are several means of attaining power, there is only one means of retaining it, and only one way of behaving when it is yours; that whatever were the origin, principles, ideas, and opinions of his ministers, they all governed in one and the same fashion; and that, despite certain purely formal divergencies, they repeated one another’s sayings with reassuring exactitude. Unhesitatingly, therefore, he appointed to power all those persons nominated by the Chambers, always preferring the revolutionaries, as being the most eager to impose their authority.
For his own part, he applied himself more especially to foreign affairs. He frequently made diplomatic journeys, dined and hunted with the kings, his cousins, and boasted himself to be the best Foreign Minister imaginable. When at home he kept himself in countenance as well as the miseries of the times would allow. He was neither greatly loved nor greatly respected by his people, which assured him of this inestimable advantage, that he could never cause disappointment. Exempt from the affections of the public, he was never threatened by the unpopularity which is the assured lot of whomsoever is popular.
His kingdom was wealthy. Commerce and industry flourished there, yet without undergoing such expansion as to cause anxiety to neighbouring States. Above all, its finances commanded admiration. The solidity of its credit appeared unshakable; financiers referred to it with enthusiasm and affection, their eyes moist with generous tears And thereby a certain honour was reflected upon King Christophe.
The peasants held him responsible for the bad harvests, but these were rare. The fertility of the soil and the patience of the tillers caused the land to abound in fruits and grains, wines and flocks. The factory hands, by their violent and unceasing demands, alarmed the middles classes, who relied on the King to protect them from the social revolution: the workers, on the other hand, could not overthrow him, for they were the weaker; nor did they wish to do so, since they could not see that they had anything to gain by his fall. He never assisted them, neither did he oppress them, with the result that they were always a menace and never a danger.
The sovereign could count upon the army; its tone was good. The tone of the army invariably is good; all measures are taken to ensure that it shall remain so; this is the first necessity of the State. For were it to lose this tone the Government would be overthrown immediately.
King Christophe protected religion. Truth to tell, he was not a devout person, and in order that his ideas should not be contrary to his faith, he took the useful precaution of never examining a single article of the latter. He heard Mass in his chapel, and was always pressing respectful attentions and favours upon his bishops, amongst whom were to be found three or four ultramontanes who overwhelmed him with abuse.
The baseness and servility of his magistracy inspired him with an insurmountable disgust. He could not conceive how his subjects could endure so unjust a justice; but these magistrates counterbalanced their shameful weakness in respect of the strong by an inflexible harshness toward the weak.
Their severity reassured “the interests” and commanded respect.
Christophe V had noticed that his decrees produced either no appreciable effect whatever, or else results which were the contrary of those which he expected. Consequently he refrained from action. His orders and decorations were his best instruments of sovereignty. He awarded them to his opponents, who were thereby degraded and satisfied.
The Queen had presented him with three sons. She was ugly, shrewish, stupid, and avaricious, but the people, who knew that she was neglected and deceived by the King, covered her with praise and homage. After having had experience of a multitude of women of every condition, the King chiefly frequented the society of Madame de la Poule, his intercourse with whom had become a habit. He had always loved novelty in women; but a strange woman was, for him, no longer a novelty, and the monotony of continual change oppressed him. He would return in disgust to Madame de la Poule, and this lack of novelty which seemed so tedious in those whom he saw for the first time, he bore with more patiently in an old friend. Nevertheless she bored him intensely and persistently. At times, being quite worn out by the insipidity of her eternal sameness, he tried to vary her by disguises, making her dress up as a Tyrolean, an Andalusian, a Capuchin friar, a captain of Dragoons, or a nun; but never for a moment did he fail to find her insipid.
His chief occupation was hunting — an hereditary function of kings and princes, handed down to them from the earliest of mankind; an antique necessity which has become a sport; a toil in which the great find pleasure. There is no pleasure without fatigue. Christophe V hunted six days a week.
One day, in the forest, he said to Monsieur de Quatrefeuilles, his first Equerry:
“What a bore stag-hunting is!”
“Sire,” answered the Equerry, “you will be very glad of a rest after the hunt.”
“Quatrefeuilles,” sighed the King, “there was a time when I took pleasure in getting tired, and then in resting. Now I find no pleasure in either. For me, every occupation has the emptiness of idleness, and rest wearies me as much as painful toil.”
After reigning for ten years without wars or revolutions, regarded by his subjects as a clever politician, established as an arbiter by kings, there existed in the world no pleasure for Christophe V to taste. Pl
unged into the deepest despondency, he would often say:
“I have always black spots before my eyes, and under the cartilages of my ribs I feel a rock upon which Melancholy is enthroned.”
He lost sleep and appetite.
“I can no longer eat,” he would say to Monsieur de Quatrefeuilles, seated before his splendid service of silver gilt. “Alas, it is not the pleasures of the table I regret; I never enjoyed them; that is a pleasure no king ever enjoyed. I have the worst table in my kingdom. Only the common folk eat well: the rich have cooks who rob and poison them. The greatest cooks are those that rob and poison the most, and I have the greatest cooks in Europe. All the same, I was naturally greedy, and, like anyone else, I should have loved dainty tit-bits, had my state allowed of it.”
He complained of pains in the loins, and weights on his stomach; of weakness, with shortness of breath and palpitation of the heart. Now and again a dull flush of nerveless heat would rise to his face.
“I feel,” he used to say, “a still, dull, continuous pain, to which one gets accustomed, which is pierced, from time to time, by sudden flashes of overwhelming agony. Hence my sluggishness and my distress.”
His head swam: he suffered from fits of dizziness, headaches, cramps, spasms, and shooting pains in his sides, which stopped his breathing.
The King’s two principal physicians, Dr. Saumon and Professor Machellier, diagnosed neurasthenia.
“A morbid unity badly relaxed,” said Saumon. “A nosological entity insufficiently defined, and by that very fact indiscernible.”
Professor Machellier interrupted him:
“Call it rather, Saumon, a true pathological Proteus, which, like the Old Man of the Sea, incessantly changes its form in the grasp of the practitioner, and assumes the most fantastic and most terrifying shapes; by turns the vulture of the gastric ulcer, or the serpent of nephritis, it suddenly lifts the yellow face of jaundice, displays the red cheek-bones of tuberculosis, or grips with the strangling hands which lead one to believe that there is a hypertrophy of the heart; in short, it represents the spectre of all the disastrous ills that flesh is heir to, until, yielding to medical treatment, and acknowledging itself defeated, it flees in its true shape of simulated disease.”
Dr. Saumon was handsome, suave, and charming. He was loved by the ladies, in whom he loved himself. An elegant scientist, a fashionable physician, he could recognize aristocracy even in a caecum or a peritoneum, and was able exactly to observe the social grades dividing uterus from uterus. Professor Machellier, little, short and fat, shaped like a tub, a profuse talker, was even more foolish than his colleague Saumon. He had the same pretensions, and more difficulty in sustaining them. They loathed each other; but, having perceived that by quarrelling they would mutually destroy one another, they affected a perfect understanding, and a complete communion of thought: no sooner had one expressed an idea than the other made it his. Although each had a hearty contempt for the other’s ability and intelligence, they feared not to exchange opinions between themselves, knowing that they risked nothing, neither losing nor gaining by the exchange, seeing they were merely medical opinions.
At first the King’s illness caused them no uneasiness. They hoped that the patient would recover while they were treating him, and that this coincidence would be noted to their advantage. With common accord they prescribed an austere life (Quibus nervi dolent Venus inimica), a tonic diet, exercise in the open air, and a carefully considered application of hydrotherapy. Saumon, with the approval of Machellier, prescribed sulphuret of carbon and methyl-chloride; Machellier, Saumon acquiescing, indicated opiates, chloral and bromides.
But several months elapsed, and the King’s condition did not seem to improve in the least. And presently his sufferings became more acute.
“I feel,” said Christophe V to them one day, lying on a long chair, “as if a nest of rats were nibbling my bowels, whilst a horrible dwarf, a hooded goblin, wearing a red tunic, and shoes, had gone down into my stomach, and was attacking it with a pickaxe, and making a deep hole.”
“Sire,” said Dr. Saumon, “that is a sympathetic pain.”
“I find it antipathetic,” answered the King.
Professor Machellier intervened:
“Sire, neither Your Majesty’s stomach nor intestine is diseased. If they cause you pain it is, we will say, in sympathy with your solar plexus, whose innumerable nervous fibres, mingled and confused, tug in all directions at the bowel and the stomach like so many incandescent platinum wires.”
“Neurasthenia,” said Machellier, “a true pathological Proteus.”
But the King dismissed them both.
When they had gone:
Monsieur de Saint-Sylvain, the senior private secretary, said:
“Sire, pray consult Dr. Rodrigue.”
“Yes, Sire,” said Monsieur de Quatrefeuilles, “send for Dr. Rodrigue. There’s nothing else to be done.”
At that time Dr. Rodrigue was astonishing the world. He was to be seen almost simultaneously in all the countries of the globe. He charged such enormous fees that millionaries recognized his value. His colleagues, all over the world, whatever they thought of his knowledge and character, spoke with respect of a man who had raised medical fees to a figure hitherto unheard of. Many praised his methods, pretending that they had mastered them and were applying them at reduced rates, thereby contributing to his world-wide celebrity. But as Dr. Rodrigue was pleased to exclude from his therapeutic all laboratory products and pharmaceutical preparations, and as he never observed the formulas of the pharmacopeia, his curative methods presented a disconcerting eccentricity and certain inimitable peculiarities.
Monsieur de Saint-Sylvain, although without personal experience of Rodrigue, possessed absolute faith in him, and believed in him as in God.
He begged the King to summon the doctor who worked miracles. In vain.
“I shall stick to Saumon and Machellier,” said Christophe V. “I know them, and I know they can do nothing; while I do not know what this Rodrigue might do.”
CHAPTER II. DR. RODRIGUE
THE King had never much liked his two usual physicians. After six months’ illness he found them perfectly insupportable; as soon as he caught sight, of the handsome moustache which crowned Dr. Saumon’s everlasting and triumphant smile, and the two wisps of black hair plastered over Machellier’s pate, he ground his teeth and savagely averted his glance. One night he threw out of the window all their draughts, pills, and powders, which filled the room with a richly depressing smell. Not only did he cease to carry out their orders, but he even took pains to do the reverse of what they prescribed; he remained lying down when they recommended exercise, moved about when they ordered rest, ate when they put him on diet, fasted when they recommended stuffing; and revealed to Madame de la Poule an ardour so unaccustomed that she was unable to believe the testimony of her senses, and thought she must be dreaming. But he was no whit the better; so true it is that Medicine is a deceptive art, and that its precepts are equally vain in whichever sense one takes them. He got no worse, but he got no better.
His numerous and varied pains never left him. He complained that a colony of ants had established itself in his brain, and that this industrious and warlike community was there digging galleries, chambers, and storehouses, carrying thither provisions and materials; depositing eggs by the thousand, raising young, sustaining sieges, delivering and repulsing assaults, and fighting bloody engagements. He said he could feel it when some warrior cut with his steely mandibles through the hard, thin corselet of an enemy.
“Sire,” said Monsieur de Saint-Sylvain, “send for Dr. Rodrigue. He will surely cure you.”
But the King shrugged his shoulders, and in a moment of weakness and absent-mindedness he asked once more for medicine, and again began to diet. He no longer visited Madame de la Poule, and zealously swallowed pilules of nitrate of aconitine, which were then in the first flush of their radiant youth. Following on this abstinence and this treatmen
t, he was seized with such an attack of suffocation that his tongue protruded from his mouth and his eyes from his head. His bed was placed standing up like a grandfather’s clock, and his congested face looked like a red dial.
“The cardiac plexus is in open rebellion,” said Professor Machellier.
“In a state of great effervescence,” added Dr. Saumon.
Monsieur de Saint-Sylvain thought it a good opportunity once more to recommend Dr. Rodrigue, but the King declared that he had no need of yet another doctor. —
“Sire,” answered Saint-Sylvain, “Dr. Rodrigue is not a physician.”
“Ah!” exclaimed Christophe V. “What you say, Monsieur de Saint-Sylvain, is all to his advantage, and prejudices me in his favour. If he is not a physician, what is he?”
“A scientist, a man of genius, Sire, who has discovered the marvellous and unsuspected properties of matter in the radiant state, and applies them to medicine.”
But the King, in a tone which allowed of no reply, requested his private secretary to refer no more to this charlatan.
“I will never receive him, never!”
Christophe V passed the summer in a fairly tolerable fashion. He went for a cruise in a two-hundred-ton yacht with Madame de la Poule dressed as a cabin-boy. He received at breakfast the President of a Republic, a King and an Emperor, and in conjunction with them assured the peace of the world. It was wearisome work arranging the destinies of the nations, but having found in Madame de la Poule’s cabin an old novel of the kind written for shop-girls, he read it with a passionate interest that procured him for some hours a delicious oblivion of reality. In short, except for a few headaches, a few attacks of neuralgia, some touches of rheumatism, and the boredom of existence, he managed fairly well. The autumn brought with it his old tortures. He endured the horrible sufferings of a man wrapped in ice from his waist to his feet, with his chest enveloped in flames. Yet what he suffered with still greater fear and horror were sensations which he was unable to express of unutterable conditions. There were some, he said, which made his hair stand on end. He was eaten up with anaemia, and his weakness increased daily, without diminishing his capacity for suffering.
Complete Works of Anatole France Page 380