At each of those phrases she had shaken her head obstinately. Her eyes dry, a rictus on her lips, she put her hands together. “It’s you! It’s you who talks like that! You, who have so valiantly supported me thus far! It’s you who is drawing away from me.”
“No.”
“You’re abandoning him, at any rate, and that’s the same thing. For I’m his wife, eternally. So, I ask you to reflect, since, in dooming him you’re dooming me. What do you want me to say to you? You’re a coward before Destiny, as the jurors were. You’re submissive to the same suggestions as them. Like them, you refuse to understand that an odious fatality can pursue a man...”
“Fatality, Jeanne?”
“Fatality, I repeat, I affirm. It exists, that fatality. I believe in it! I believe! Keep your conviction, but don’t try to shake mine. Think, reflect! Ask yourself why Henri should be any more guilty today than he was yesterday. Is it because this testimony is more irrefutable than the others? It testifies to a new coincidence, to the obstinacy of hazard. What does it prove, in sum? That the murderer had had yellow fever, that’s all. Is Henri the only man in Paris in that circumstance? There are mariners and colonials in the lower depths. Then why Henri? You see! You have no reply. Don’t accuse, then! Stay with him! Stay with me!”
He shook his head. “I know that, I know that…but think…this new indication, added to so many others...”
Then, frightfully alone, her hands joined, she cried out her despair; “Oh, not to be able to share one’s certainty!”
Suddenly, Mirande, illuminated, sat up straight. Why had he not thought of it sooner, since the examination of that drop of blood had rejected all doubt? Certainty...
But he could have it, absolute certainty, thanks to Brion’s prodigious heritage. It was sufficient to see Lacaze, whose departure for the Île de Ré had been delayed by a slight illness, to read within him, to glimpse behind his forehead the confession of the crime or the protestation of innocence. There was no hesitation. The serum would remove the final veil. The truth would appear. He did not even debate the arbitrariness of the means, the profanation of an amour, the espionage of a heart. No, no! First, to know…and to be finished with odious ignorance.
Impatient to act, but constrained to hide his decision from his sister, he took her hands and said to her: “Yes, it’s you who are right, little Jeannot, I don’t have the right to abandon you. So long as absolute proof doesn’t intervene, I ought to remain faithful to my first conviction. And that proof, it’s necessary for me to find. Do you believe me now? Do you forgive me?”
Her tears thanked him. But Mirande was already escaping. He hoped to obtain access to Lacaze—whom he had not seen since the assizes—by way of his friend Doisteau. He had scarcely an hour. He would find him at home.
In truth, he feared, by this new sounding, arriving at a definitive disappointment, but all the same, even if it were only a chance in a thousand, he ought to take it. Who could tell whether Lacaze might not really have succumbed to the obstinate blows of hazard?
While going along the Rue Monge, he recalled obstinately the gambler he had observed at the casino in Dorville before leaving the baccarat hall. He was one of those heroes in a smoking jacket, one of those parasites of beach resorts who, every evening, drag around their fear of the morrow and lie in wait for fortune like a bandit lying in ambush. His distressed features revealed, that evening, his somber misfortune. He had lost every bet. With what a tremulous hand, what a contraction of all his features, he had abandoned his last louis! Well, at that supreme attempt, his luck had turned. He won, and continued winning for a quarter of an hour, without a single defection of the cards, doubling, tripling and quintupling his stakes with equal good fortune. His resurrection at that moment! His exultant joy, at throwing handfuls of gold on to the baize! His bitter triumph when he saved himself, in time not to lose himself again, after having filled his hat with his sudden fortune And his grunting, like a hound thrown a morsel at the end of a hunt, or a wild beast over its prey, when, retired to a corner of the room, he had smoothed out the crumpled bills, lined up piles of gold coins and ivory chips!
Thus, fate, after having pursued Lacaze so relentlessly, might have reserved him a sudden revenge. In the chalice that one man empties for millions of others, in the obscure division of good and evil, Fortune might suddenly exchange the lees for a generous liquor.
Mirande arrived at the Place Maubert. With a backward glance, he made sure that he was not observed. Then, going along the buildings of the market, he joined an auto whose driver saluted him. It was a hired car that he retained permanently, which permitted him to save time in his steps. He had been obliged to hide it from Jeanne, because he could not reveal the origin of his small fortune to her. He gave Doisteau’s address.
When he arrived, the surgeon was just getting out of a carriage. He was coming back from his service at the hospital, his expression both weary and joyful.
“Oh, my friend, what a morning! Three bellies, a breast, a shoulder and a knee! I’m worn out, exhausted, bowed down...but content, all the same.”
“And why, great gods? Why this joy?”
Doisteau raised before his friend religiously, as if it were a pyx, a bottle full of liquid in which a piece of tissue was suspended
“I was offered this morning,” he declared, “fifty centimeters of apache!”
“Apache?”
“Yes. There are amusing strokes of luck in our profession, and the macabre turns to vaudeville on occasion. Can you imagine that they brought me a little while ago a filthy scoundrel, one of those fortification rats who live on alcohol and ‘thrusts of Père François,’ who, after a battle with his peers—a matter of honor, it appears; where does honor go to build its nest?—had received a magnificent dagger-thrust in the abdomen. He was dying of it. No! He wasn’t dying of it! I mean that he was dead of it. Exsanguinated face, absence of pulse, you can see it from here: a veritable corpse.
“Others had would have sent him to the Morgue, but you know my ideas. I think, personally, that people disinterest themselves too easily in subjects that present the appearance of death, when a rapid intervention might resuscitate them. The human body breaks down occasionally, just like an automobile. In brief, I had the pseudo-cadaver taken to the operating table, I opened up his belly, deployed his intestines, and encountered a lovely gash that had plowed the entire caecum. There are some, aren’t there, who would have been content to stitch up the rent? And then, small chance. Well, me, I took out the lot, the entire perforated section. And here it is, that tube, in the alcohol. It ought to be well content. That one, I sutured, dried, drained, and my corpse...”
“Lives again?”
“Lives again! To the point that I was able to ask him: ‘Is it true, my boy, that you burgle safes as easily as I’ve just burgled your belly?’ And he understood, the animal; he laughed.”
At that memory, he chuckled himself. But Mirande, absorbed by his project, remained anxious.
“I need your help,” he said.
“Whatever you wish.”
“Perhaps, in your capacity as a prison surgeon, you can get me into the Santé?”
Doisteau frowned. “That’s strictly forbidden by the regulations,” he objected. “What do you want to do in that hole?”
“I want to see Lacaze. You know that he’s ill.”
“Yes, I know. I’ve seen the poor devil several times.” Perplexed, the surgeon tugged at his moustache. “I’d prefer it if you asked me for something else. But in the end, for a friend…a friend like you... listen, you’re in luck. Just now, I’m replacing my colleague in medicine. If you promise not to get me into trouble, I could take you along as my assistant.”
“Oh, thank you, Doisteau!”
“Yes, but above all, don’t compromise me. They’d have my head!”
“Don’t worry.”
“Tomorrow morning, then, half past nine, at the gate.”
“I’ll be punctual. Thanks again!�
�
The following morning, Jeanne went out early. Mirande was glad of that. He would be able to proceed at his leisure to inject himself, in order to be fully under the influence of the serum when he arrived at the rendezvous, and he did not risk surprising the young woman’s thoughts. He avoided the chance of an investigation that offended his scruples.
As soon as he heard the door close behind her, he consulted his watch. The incubation required an hour. He had time. At a quarter past eight he took out the medical kit that never left his person now. With the gravity of an officiant he passed the needle through an alcohol flame, broke off the tip of the ampoule, slowly aspired the substance and pushed it into his flesh. Then he tidied everything away, went to the chair at his desk and waited, his eyes on his watch.
At Dorville, on the beach that night, in the emotion of the first proof, he had not studied his physiological reaction to the serum. This time, he wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to monitor himself calmly minute by minute.
He was astonished not to feel any precursory symptom. Nothing. Not a wave within his skull. Had he mistaken the ampoule? No; error was inadmissible. In any case, Brion’s notebook, consulted many times, did not indicate any preliminary disturbance. To while away the time, he tried to think about his old master, From then on, the time weighed upon him less. Once again, he saw the august face gained by the lividity of death. He heard the last words, broken by paralysis. There, still, a mystery remained. Had Brion hastened his end by the use, by the abuse, of the serum? Had the prodigious liquid had a toxic effect on his organism?
When the clock chimed nine o’clock, a tremor ran through him, the effect of an imperceptible vertigo. A slight transpiration moistened his brow. Then he felt an astonishing need for action, like an appetite for communication with others. A thousand energies animated him, brought him to his feet. In order to employ them, he arranged the papers on his desk, and then scattered them again. He made a feverish note of a chemical formula for which he had been searching for months, and which had just suddenly reappeared to him.
He watched the course of the clock’s hands more feverishly, until the time he had fixed arrived.
“Quarter past nine—finally!”
He got up, but at that moment, he perceived a strange thought. At the same time, voices filled the neighboring antechamber. Furthermore, the cerebral language and the spoken language were so closely associated, expressing the same indignation, that he could not dissociate them.
He was preparing to intervene when Francette knocked and, as was her custom, irrupted into the room without waiting for a response.
“Would you believe it?” she exclaimed, immediately, her eyebrows menacing. “Would you believe that that animal won’t leave his merchandise without being paid?”
“What animal, Francette?”
“The coal-merchant, of course. Mam’zelle went out without leaving me the money. And now he says he’ll take his coke away of he isn’t paid! Have we ever made him wait for a settlement? Sure, we aren’t Rothschilds, but damn it, we’re not paupers either!”
“Why didn’t you advance him from your own money, as you’ve often done before?”
For a second, Francette was nonplussed, her mutinous head raised, her lips parted. But her thought, whose message Mirande received, confessed: Oh, petit patron, if I only could! But I can’t any more. I’ve used up all my savings, not a brass farthing left! Oh, my poor nest-egg! If I dared, I’d tell you that I poured it all into your household in the time when you were in the soup and Mam’zelle no longer looked at the book of expenses! Sure, it’s for her that I’m cleaned out, and for her Lacaze too, but it’s most of all for you, patron, because you’re such a chic fellow, so decent, and I love you, oh, how I love you...
But she had pulled herself together and, aloud, feigning confusion, she said: “Yes, that’s true. I could have paid him. I didn’t think of that...”
An admirable and touching lie! Mirande had received the windfall of naïve tenderness and generous devotion full in the heart. For two pins he would have gone to the worthy girl and planted two chaste kisses on her pink cheeks. My poor little Francette…! But how would he have explained such an impulse?
At least he wanted to compensate such discreet attachment with a facile generosity. He took out his wallet.
“Hold out your hand, my worthy Francette.”
And into that poor little grubby hand he slipped a large blue bill. “Take it, Francette, Pay the coalman and keep the rest.”
“For me?”
He’s crazy. It’s not possible. He’s crazy, my petit patron, proclaimed the secret voice. At the same time, with a gesture, Francette refused the offering. He had to flee in order to leave it in her hands.
Still deeply moved by the naïve homage, he was going downstairs when the rustle of a dress attracted his attention. Someone was coming up. He leaned over the banister and recognized Jeanne.
So he was about to glimpse his sister’s thoughts too? Oh, certainly, he admired her purity, her nobility, her moral beauty. But what if some shadow appeared on that whiteness, some trivial streak on the immaculate page? An impious suspicion. But the profanation would be even more impious. No, no, let the veil of illusion continue to envelop that fraternal tenderness.
And, out of fear as much as respect, he moved aside at the next landing and plunged into a dark corridor. Instinctively, he would have blocked his ears had he not been certain of remaining sensitive to the immaterial waves.
Alas, the corridor arrived quickly at a dead end. Scarcely two meters separated him from the young woman when she went past him without seeing him, and he could not escape her radiation.
But once again, he exalted in the discovery of a treasure. Dear Jeanne…she never ceased to love in her dolor. At that moment, as always, the thought of her fiancé filed her soul. She saw herself relegated with him to distant Guyana. She shared, and lightened, his harsh exile. She exhorted him to patience. She promised him a definitive triumph.
Oh, the divine canticle of pure and tutelary amour...the consoling apparition... Not all hearts, then, were rotten with egotism and turpitude. There were Jeannes, and there were Francettes...
Jeanne had passed by...
Mirande made haste, for time was pressing. He reached his auto, still parked in the Place Maubert, and gave the address of the Santé. On the way, he glimpsed the interior monologue of the driver, who was launching energetic abuse at his vehicle—and every time the vehicle passed close to a pedestrian, Mirande received the murmur of his thought on the wing, like the rapid rustle that one hears in an automobile as it passes the trees alongside the road.
Doisteau was waiting outside the prison gate.
“Am I late?”
“Slightly. It’s nothing,” the surgeon replied, politely. Internally, however, he expressed his annoyance at having been stuck on the sidewalk when urgent tasks awaited. Mirande excused him, effortlessly, for that slight divergence.
“Follow me,” Doisteau ordered. And, in a whisper, his thought stirred an amusing apprehension:
You can follow me, my old Mirande, we can mock the regulations together. What do you have to say to Lacaze so urgently? Do you think he’s innocent, for a start? Aren’t you, rather, defending him with such energy to spare your own honor in the eyes of others? Yes, what do you want from him, our Lacaze? You haven’t come, by chance, with the secret intention of helping him to escape? You aren’t carrying in your jacket pocket, I hope, a false beard or a revolver? You know, my old Mirande, I like you a lot, but no tricks. Oh, no, no dirty tricks!
Meanwhile, they had gone through the heavy door where soldiers were yawning. They traversed a little courtyard crammed between severe walls and went into a maze of corridors and sonorous staircases.
Finally, they reached, at the heart of a vast intersection, a glazed office, elevated and isolated, a kind of enormous searchlight lantern, from which the view extended into the radiating corridors where the cells were aligned.
There, a warder greeted Doisteau with a familiar salute. The surgeon gave a signature and introduced Mirande as his assistant. All the reefs had been crossed.
Followed by his friend, Doisteau took one of the long brightly-lit, cold and bare avenues, bordered by narrow doors. To the warder who was guarding that span he said: “Monsieur is going to examine the prisoner Lacaze.” Then, to Mirande: “I’ll come and collect you after my visit. Be quick.”
He drew away. And while the warder opened the cell door, with a great rattle of keys, Mirande battled with his supreme scruples. He was about to read the consciousness of his friend, delivered to him defenselessly, like an open book. That unequal struggle offended his sense of justice. Had he the right to surprise a confession that the condemned man had not wanted to be extracted from him? Was not that sly inquisition more odious than all the procedures of torture and interrogation?
But the warden, having opened the door, stood aside. And immediately, an infinite pity invaded him.
Henri Lacaze was lying on his bed. He was asleep. A heavy sleep had finally succeeded a feverish night. His bedcovers thrown off, he had only kept a single sheet. The cloth, which enveloped him like a shroud with rigid creases, emphasized the thinness of his body. And beneath the overly long beard, what a poor face, furrowed, reduced, ochreous, in which physical malady and moral torment were inscribed in dolorous lines. Oh, if that man was guilty, the suffering that he had already undergone had already paid more than sufficiently for his crime.
He was asleep, dreamlessly, for Mirande would have glimpsed the mysterious play. He was asleep, sunk in oblivion. Oh, to let him continue to forget! Impossible.
“Henri! Henri!”
At that appeal, the condemned man started and rubbed his eyes.
“You…! You…!” he stammered, stupefied.
At the same time, the brain awoke. Mirande perceived the commencement of the slow march of ideas. They expressed, first and foremost, a doubt as to the reality of the apparition.
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