The Doctored Man

by Maurice Renard

  There is nothing, however, that does not come to an end.

  After a time, Mr. Patpington began to show signs of weariness and impatience. He had had enough of being invisible and being blind. He wanted to recover his original properties—not in order to get back to work, for he recognized that he would henceforth be incapable of that, but solely to escape from darkness and cease to be someone who was no longer similar to his peers. His gaiety declined. He became very unhappy and, not being able to find the means of becoming visible again and recovering his sight, he gave way to bitter despair.

  Hopkins then became very perplexed. Several times, he was on the point of confessing to Mr. Patpington that he had fooled him. Perhaps, after all, the knowledge that he was not invisible, that he was not abnormal, would bring the old man some relief. But how miserable would it make him to know that he was incurably blind, and devoid of glory?

  He suddenly hit upon the solution. One might suppose that Hopkins had had it already, without knowing it, when Mr. Patpington gave him the ingredients of the potion—because, for several days, Hopkins had been obsessed with different memories. His visit to the illustrious colleague in London and a journey that he had once made to the French Pyrenees returned incessantly to his mind, along with other thoughts that, unfortunately, created confusion. Take note also that he continually repeated to himself: “That man obeys me, blindly. The man is completely under my thumb,” without seeing where that might lead. Finally, though, it was the discovery of the potion that triggered the denouement.

  “Arthur!” called Mr. Patpington, one morning. “Come quickly! Bring a pencil and paper!”

  Hopkins did as he was asked, hurriedly. Three lines of alphabetical characters and figures, large and small, were dictated to him in a feverish voice.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “The formula! The formula of visibility! To make me visible, Arthur! It’s to be drunk. Prepare it for me immediately!”

  “To be drunk?”

  Hopkins ran his eyes over the “prescription.” The preparation was enough to poison all the citizens of Iping. Out of habit, however, he raised no objection, awaiting an opportunity to find a way to get out of it, and he went downstairs, thoughtful and full of annoyance. By degrees, though, Hopkins turned his frown into a hopeful expression, and, having opened the liquor cupboard, he set about mixing a cocktail whose fantasy would have alarmed the least traditional of barmen.

  The mixture contained at least a dozen spirits, chosen at hazard, in doses selected in the same way. It made, when complete, a brownish liquid that filled a sherry glass. Hopkins added a few drops of various medicines to it, in order to give the concoction an appropriate aroma. Then he went back up to Mr. Patpington.

  “Drink!” he told him. “That’s the ticket.”

  Mrs. Hopkins, who had assisted in the confection of the cocktail, was hot on her husband’s heels.

  “God grant that it will succeed!” said Mr. Patpington—and he swallowed the mixture in a single draught.

  “Lie down on the bed,” Hopkins instructed. “It will take effect more rapidly.”

  Mr. Patpington lay down, meekly.

  A minute went by. The congenial old man smiled beatifically and licked his lips.

  “Oh, look! Look!” cried Hopkins, abruptly. “Your hands, your nose…LOOK! Your ears. You’re reappearing! Uncle, Uncle, what a pleasure it is to see you again! There! See—your chin is reforming!”

  But he could not prevent himself, while he uttered these frightful whoppers, from examining Uncle Pat’s expression anxiously. There was a mirror there; he held it out to him. The other, sitting up again, pivoted on his backside hurriedly, sat on the edge of the bed, and paraded his astonished eyes over everything.

  “Most agreeable!” he sighed, in ecstasy.

  Hopkins felt his breast swelling with pride. “O powerful, redoubtable and mysterious suggestion!” he murmured.

  Mr. Patpington contemplated the external world affectionately. “Arthur! Mary! Myself! I can see you and I also can see myself now! But what…what’s causing all that dizziness? My word, I’m drunk!”

  “No,” said Hopkins, sympathetically. “It’s just that you haven’t yet readapted, you see. Stay seated on the bed.

  “Dear, oh, dear little Uncle Pat” said Mrs. Hopkins, kissing Mr. Patpington on both cheeks.

  A broad mute laugh enlivened the fresh face of the man who had wanted to realize the most astonishing fable in contemporary literature. He nodded his head and swayed from side to side, struggling against a happy vertigo that was making him lose his balance.

  “How do you feel, Uncle Pat?” asked Mrs. Hopkins, maternally.

  “Very well! Very well!” proclaimed Mr. Patpington, laughing. His plump little heels pounded the mattress-base. He suddenly launched an oratorical finger toward Hopkins. “When I was invisible…” he began, self-importantly.

  Hopkins realized immediately that that was a phrase he would hear repeatedly, until his uncle was deprived of speech—but he loved Mr. Patpington so much that he wanted to go on hearing it until he himself was deprived of hearing.

  SINCE SINBAD

  You have asked me, my dear Jean Ray, to write a few lines about “Fantastic literature” for the readers of L’Ami des livres.

  Like everyone, in fact—including the undersigned—you call “fantastic,” for want of a better term, all recreational literary production that does not deal with known realities: the entire oeuvre that extends from Aladdin; or, The Marvelous Lamp to La Mort de la Terre.32

  Well, I think that the first thing to do is to limit the domain of the word “fantastic,” an adjective evocative of devilry, the supernatural, crazy dreams, even nightmares; an epithet too exclusive of thought, method and knowledge, which is not at all adaptable to the work of a Wells, a Rosny Aîné, or some other writer I am not used to citing.

  The application of the word “fantastic” to stories like The Time Machine or “Un Autre monde”33—or, more accurately, the confusion of genres revealed and consecrated by that application—makes a considerable contribution to the laborious slowness with which the public moves toward distractions that are, however, quite new and delightfully educational. It is because the public sees them only as simple fantasies. It classifies them in the same family as the tales of The Thousand-and-One Nights. It takes them for “Ali Babas” arbitrarily accommodated to present-day tastes—which is to say, seasoned with science. It tells itself that Scheherazade’s imagination is not of a kind to support the parasitic invasion of electrical or chemical modernities. In its view, science and imagination, thus combined, are reciprocally harmful. The former, in departing from the truth, loses all is value; the latter, touched by reason, creases to sparkle.

  All that comes, you see, from the way the public reasons, and from the fact that it reasons badly.

  The truth is that in the 19th century, the state of science and the progress of knowledge have put writers in the position of manipulating hypotheses in the speculative field. By virtue of that fact, the physical world has become the object of conjectural, “parascientific” studies, which are not less captivating for arising essentially from philosophy—with the condition, nevertheless, of being considered as what they are, and not being taxed as “fantastic.”

  It seems to me that the fantastic, properly speaking, attained its highest realization in Hoffmann, and most especially in Poe, and then in Erckmann-Chatrian. I see no one in our era, except Ewers,34 who can be compared with them, although his oeuvre is tiny compared with Edgar Poe’s and appears to us to be tainted by a pervasive sadism, compared with which Poe’s cerebral and transient perversity seems almost negligible.

  The fantastic is, therefore, not French. We consume it avidly, but we do not know how to prepare it. Excuse me, but it is not the French qualities that I value most highly in the works of the Lorrainean writers Erckmann and Chatrian; and I must say that there is a predominance of idealist anguish and metaphysical torment that i
s so scarcely American in the work of Edgar Poe that I often wonder about his ancestry. For, even while they are removing genies, enchanters, ogres and fairies from their tales, and their art reveals a singular and troubling poetry in their work, they are serving other causes than that of childhood morality.

  Until now, the fantastic tale has been a sort of artificial mythology; now, it is something else entirely. It agitates, in an obscure fashion, the passions, dolor and mental disquiet; it has a human and psychological basis. It continues to be a fable, but one that pushes its allusions into the extreme depths of emotional life, and which, given the amplitude of the means at its disposal and being carelessness of any limitation of implausibility, succeeds in making us perceive strange subtleties in this regard. Because of that, it retains more poetry than the novel. And I do not intend, here, to place these more-or-less ingenious short stories—which are no more than arabesque imaginative play for the reader, and inconsequential amusement for the reader—in the ranks of works worthy of classification and criticism.

  The majority of “parascientific” novels and stories (I resolutely proscribe the term “scientific marvelous”35) also present the merit of being instruments of human observation which in the unusual light of suppositions, cause certain normally-imperceptible interior reliefs to stand out. But what clearly distinguishes the parascientific from the fantastic is that the fabulation of the former must, in itself, possess a “value”—a rational value—in being the development of a logical and fecund hypothesis, while we demand nothing similar of the latter; it is sufficient for us that its subject should be charming, burlesque or terrible, and that there should be something subhuman in it.

  Now, the postulate of a parascientific novel can itself embody such a treasure of novelty, possess such a power of evocation, that its exposure, taken for what it is, constitutes an infinitely seductive and fruitful work. That which, in the fantastic, is merely a form, merely an expression, can here become the very foundation, the substance. And if the conceptions that emerge from it are not always related to humankind, or if the psychological element is absent therefrom, I say that no great harm is done.

  Since people have been writing novels, every novel is psychological; to the extent that people have been persuaded that no novel exists in which no psychology is manifest, and that the quality of a novel is in direct proportion to the dose of psychology that it contains. I do not approve of that, because it makes me see readers—Aristarchos36 included—as monkeys crouched in front of mirrors.

  I recall what was said, 30 years ago, about the first performances of the works of Claude Debussy. People said, disdainfully, “That’s not music”—and the moment that it “wasn’t music” it became worthless! Well, let people cease to call stories stripped of psychology “novels,” if they insist—but please allow people, from time to time, to interrupt their self-contemplation in order to raise their eyes above their navels, to accept that there are a few other objects in the universe that are not without interest (are there not others, even in humans, than psychology?) and to approach the parascientific novel without arguing about its psychological nature or lack of it, or its ambiguity or lack of it. Let them abandon that “accurate, subtle, powerful” and benevolent fictive opium in order to discover new points of view. Let them play, blissfully, in this artificial paradise…

  Artificial? Tell me, is science any less artificial? What are its falsified theories worth today? What will the principles vigorously upheld as I write be worth tomorrow? As much as an outmoded novel—nothing more! Who can affirm, for example, that Wells’s Invisible Man might not emerge from the unreal tomorrow? That the seemingly-chimerical possibility in question will not become a matter of everyday fact—apart from the error that I subsequently revealed, and which represents a stupidity so unexpected on the part of the English author!

  Let us amuse ourselves by comparing the invisibility of a living body (a hypothetical discovery) with radiology (an actual discovery). We might be surprised to observe that these discoveries would have appeared equally impossible to one of our forefathers who had had taken it into his head to reflect upon them. How, in fact, would each of them have presented itself to his logical mind? In the form of two fallacies similarly belied by reality.

  This is the fallacy of The Invisible Man:

  Bodies that light passes completely through are invisible.

  Now, there is a man through whom light passes completely.

  Therefore, there is an invisible man.

  And this is the fallacy of radiology:

  We can see through bodies through which a certain quantity of light passes.

  Now, a quantity of light passes through opaque bodies.

  Therefore, we can see through opaque bodies.

  I know of no example, moreover, which demonstrates better than this comparison how the parascientific differs from the fantastic, the former primarily provoking the joy of intelligence, the other initial soliciting the pleasure of the emotions.

  There is no point in searching any further for the reason for the discouragement that led Wells to stop working in the vein of The War of the Worlds and why Rosny Aîné so rarely publishes works like “Les Xipéhuz” or La Force mystérieuse.37 To earn a living by addressing oneself to intelligence—that, indeed, would be truly fantastic!

  THE FROG

  I was 13 years old. I had scarcely emerged from the fearful era in which the terror of darkness and solitude reigns over childhood. I was a thin boy devoid of brilliance, whose dreamy eyes dominated a spare face. Timid, impressionable and affectionate, I was perpetually agitated by emotion. The redoubtable and seductive world of the unknown already attracted me with an irresistible force—and when Science offered my youthful avidity some strange marvel or some veiled glimpse of a troubling mist, I felt myself transported by intoxication.

  I loved mystery, especially the kind that borders on knowledge as night borders on day: the mystery at which the instruments of knowledge are already aimed. I loved, as I still do, the inexplicable, the future, the possible—and, first and foremost, the divine, exquisite and prestigious Hypothesis, which projects many a fantastic ray of light into every darkness, maintaining legend and fable among us, in new costumes.

  I was an assiduous dreamer. Nothing seduced me like venturing to the extreme limits of certainty, leaning over the edge of the pit of obscurity that opens there, challenging the powers suspecting of luring there to a duel and—so to speak—tormenting the hydra crouching in its lair. Then, with a tremulous, keen and perverse kind of joy, I felt the old fears of my early life reborn within me, having become voluptuous.

  It was a happy period in which I knew almost nothing, with the result that study reserved a thousand marvels of contrary nature for me, and every day brought me its discovery and its enigma.

  Forgive me for extending myself thus in the depiction of my temperament. It is just that I deem it indispensable, in order to judge a fact reported by a witness, to know exactly what tendencies that witness has. It is necessary to know through what sorts of lenses a phenomenon has been observed. Otherwise, all sorts of errors can be produced, from errors of judgment to scientific ones. If I talk about myself, therefore, it is because I was the principal witness to the following adventure, and it is vital that nothing should neglected in the order of psychological precautions when it is a matter of exposing a bizarre incident as delicately ambiguous as the death of Madame Chablas.

  I shall insist, therefore—but not out of egotism—on the infinite sadness with which my childish soul was overwhelmed in the era when the vicissitudes of that macabre day unfolded.

  My parents, convinced that they were acting in my best interests, had sent me to the Ecole Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It was an expensive boarding school not far from a large town on the coast of Normandy. It could only accommodate some 60 pupils. It provided facilities for sport and for manual labor, but studies did not suffer for that, and I must admit that boarding in those conditions bore as little rese
mblance to imprisonment as is possible.

  Until then, however, I had never left my paternal home, to which tutors had come in relay to educate me, and, pleasant as the Ecole Jean-Jacques Rousseau was, I had difficulty getting used to the abrupt change of environment. Exiled far from my family, deprived of my mother’s continual pampering, sensitive to all the frictions of discipline and camaraderie, I sought opportunities to isolate myself, and, in spite of the fact that the rules forbade it, I often found means of returning to my room and indulging myself passionately in the sour and precocious delights of nostalgia.

  Every such occasion was like a rendezvous with solitude. I chose in advance some happy memory of the familial past, and savored it delectably, until the illusion dissipated in the wake of mental contention or the bell summoned me back to class.

  My room, moreover, possessed another, quite different, attraction—an attraction whose strength I did not suspect but which, however, gradually took hold of me, so powerfully that nowadays, it is in that memory that I delight in penetrating the freshest and purest recess of my youth. That room—it was number 2—was situated on the second floor. The window overlooked the Atlantic Ocean. Beyond the trees in the courtyard—which was almost a garden—one could see the immense rectilinear horizon into which the sun sank every evening. The ridge of the cliffs loomed above the roofs of the school. It was a grandiose and profound spectacle; the future would reveal its cost to me, but a secret need drove me to contemplate it from the very first.

  Then again, I would not have been a human child if I had not savored the forbidden pleasure of withdrawing from all surveillance and being able, without being seen behind my half-closed Venetian blinds, to spy on the movements of others—which is what I was doing on that sunlit day, the sinister day of the frog, whose date is inscribed on the tomb of Monsieur and Madame Chablas.

  I shall explain shortly who Monsieur and Madame Chablas were, but first I must explain who Mourgue was.