"We have got so we no longer dose substances but prescribe ready-made remedies and use those surprising specifics which fill up the fourth pages of the journals. It's a compromise medicine, a democratic medicine, one cure for all cases. It's scandalous, it's silly.
"No, there is no use in talking. The old therapeutics based on experience was better than this. At least it know that remedies ingested in pill, powder, or bolus form were treacherous, so it prescribed them only in the liquid state. Now, too, every physician specializes. The oculists see only the eyes, and, to cure them, quite calmly poison the body. With their pilocarpine they have ruined the health of how many people for ever! Others treat cutaneous affections. They drive an eczema inward on an old man who as soon as he is 'cured' becomes childish or dangerous. There is no more solidarity. Allegiance to one party means hostility to all others. Its a mess. Now my honourable confrères are stumbling around, taking a fancy to medicaments which they don't even know how to use. Take antipyrine, for example. It is one of the very few really active products that the chemists have found in a long time. Well, where is the doctor who knows that, applied in a compress with iodide and cold Bondonneau spring water, antipyrine combats the supposedly incurable ailment, cancer? And if that seems incredible, it is true, nevertheless."
"Honestly," said Durtal, "you believe that the old-time doctors came nearer healing?"
"Yes, because, miraculously, they know the effects of certain invariable remedies prepared without fraud. Of course it is self-evident that when old Paré eulogized 'sack medicine' and ordered his patients to carry pulverized medicaments in a little sack whose form varied according to the organ to be healed, assuming the form of a cap for the head, of a bagpipe for the stomach, of an ox tongue for the spleen, he probably did not obtain very signal results. His claim to have cured gastralgia by appositions of powder of red rose, coral and mastic, wormwood and mint, aniseed and nutmeg, is certainly not to be borne out, but he also had other systems, and often he cured, because he possessed the science of simples, which is now lost.
"The present-day physicians shrug their shoulders when the name of Ambrose Paré is mentioned. They used to pooh-pooh the idea of the alchemists that gold had medicinal virtue. Their fine scorn does not now prevent them from using alternate doses of the salts and of the filings of this metal. They use concentrated arseniate of gold against anemia, muriate against syphilis, cyanide against amenorrhea and scrofula, and chloride of sodium and gold against old ulcers. No, I assure you, it is disgusting to be a physician, for in spite of the fact that I am a doctor of science and have extensive hospital experience I am quite inferior to humble country herborists, solitaries, who know a great deal more than I about what is useful to know-and I admit it."
"And homeopathy?"
"It has some good things about it and some bad ones. It also palliates without curing. It sometimes represses maladies, but for grave and acute cases it is impotent, just like this Mattei system, which, however, is useful as an intermediary to stave off a crisis. With its blood-and lymph-purifying products, its antiscrofoloso, its angiotico, its anti-canceroso, it sometimes modifies morbid states in which other methods are of no avail. For instance, it permits a patient whose kidneys have been demoralized by iodide of potassium to gain time and recuperate so that he can safely begin to drink iodide again!
"I add that terrific shooting pains, which rebel even against chloroform and morphine, often yield to an application of 'green electricity.' You ask me, perhaps, of what ingredients this liquid electricity is made. I answer that I know absolutely nothing about it. Mattei claims that he has been able to fix in his globules and liquors the electrical properties of certain plants, but he has never given out his recipe, hence he can tell whatever stories suit him. What is curious, anyway, is that this system, thought out by a Roman count, a Catholic, has its most important following and propaganda among Protestant pastors, whose original asininity becomes abysmal in the unbelievable homilies which accompany their essays on healing. Indeed, considered seriously, these systems are a lot of wind. The truth is that in the art of healing we grope along at hazard. Nevertheless, with a little experience and a great deal of nerve we can manage so as not too shockingly to depopulate the cities. Enough of that, old man, and now where have you been keeping yourself?"
"Just what I was going to ask you. You haven't been to see me for over a week."
"Well, just now everybody in the world is ill and I am racing around all the time. By the way, I've been attending Chantelouve, who has a pretty serious attack of gout. He complains of your absence, and his wife, whom I should not have taken for an admirer of your books, of your last novel especially, speaks to me unceasingly of them and you. For a person customarily so reserved, she seems to me to have become quite enthusiastic about you, does Mme. Chantelouve. Why, what's the matter?" he exclaimed, seeing how red Durtal had become.
"Oh, nothing, but I've got to be going. Good night."
"Why, aren't you feeling well?"
"Oh, it's nothing, I assure you."
"Oh, well," said Des Hermies, knowing better than to insist. "Look at this," and took him into the kitchen and showed him a superb leg of mutton hanging beside the window. "I hung it up in a draft so as to get some of the crass freshness out of it. We'll eat it when we have the astrologer Gévingey to dine with us at Carhaix's. As I am the only person alive who knows how to boil a gigot à l'Anglaise, I am going to be the cook, so I shan't come by for you. You will find me in the tower, disguised as a scullery maid."
Once outside, Durtal took a long breath. Well, well, his unknown was Chantelouve's wife. Impossible! She had never paid the slightest attention to him. She was silent and cold. Impossible! And yet, why had she spoken that way to Des Hermies? But surely if she had wanted to see him she would have come to his apartment, since they were acquaintances. She would not have started this correspondence under a pseudonym-
"H. de Maubel!" he said suddenly, "why, Mme. Chantelouve's name is Hyacinthe, a boy's name which suits her very well. She lives in the rue Babneux not vary far from the rue Littré post-office. She is a blonde, she has a maid, she is a fervent Catholic. She's the one."
And he experienced, almost simultaneously, two absolutely distinct sensations.
Of disappointment, first, for his unknown pleased him better. Mme. Chantelouve would never realize the ideal he had fashioned for himself, the tantalizing features, the agile, wild animal body, the melancholy and ardent bearing, which he had dreamed. Indeed, the mere fact of knowing the unknown rendered her less desirable, more vulgar. Accessibility killed the chimera.
At the same time he experienced a lively relief. He might have been dealing with a hideous old crone, and Hyacinthe, as he immediately began to call her, was desirable. Thirty-three at most, not pretty, but peculiar; blonde, slight and supple, with no hips, she seemed thin because she was small-boned. The face, mediocre, spoiled by too big a nose, but the lips incandescent, the teeth superb, her complexion ever so faint a rose in the slightly bluish milk white of rice water a little troubled.
Then her real charm, the really deceptive enigma of her, was in her eyes; ash-grey eyes which seemed uncertain, myopic, and which conveyed an expression of resigned boredom. At certain moments the pupils glowed like a gem of grey water and sparks of silver twinkled to the surface. By turns they were dolent, forsaken, languorous, and haughty. He remembered that those eyes had often brought his heart into his throat!
In spite of circumstantial evidence, he reflected that those impassioned letters did not correspond in any way to this woman in the flesh. Never was woman more controlled, more adept in the lies of good breeding. He remembered the Chantelouve at-homes. She seemed attentive, made no contribution to the conversation, played the hostess smiling, without animation. It was a kind of case of dual personality. In one visible phase a society woman, prudent and reserved, in another concealed phase a wild romantic, mad with passion, hysterical of body, nymphomaniac of soul. It hardly seemed probab
le.
"No," he said, "I am on the wrong track. It's merely by chance that Mme. Chantelouve spoke of my books to Des Hermies, and I mustn't jump to the conclusion that she is smitten with me and that she has been writing me these hot letters. It isn't she, but who on earth is it?"
He continued to revolve the question, without coming any nearer a solution. Again he called before his eyes the image of this woman, and admitted that she was really potently seductive, with a fresh, girlish body, flexible, and without a lot of repugnant flesh-and mysterious, with her concentrated air, her plaintive eyes, and even her coldness, real or feigned.
He summarized all that he really knew about her: simply that she was a widow when she married Chantelouve, that she had no children, that her first husband, a manufacturer of chasubles, had, for unknown reasons, committed suicide. That was all. On the other hand, too, too much was known about Chantelouve!
Author of a history of Poland and the cabinets of the north; of a history of Boniface VIII and his times; a life of the blessed Jeanne de Valois, founder of the Annonciade; a biography of the Venerable Mother Anne de Xaintonge, teacher of the Company of Saint Ursula; and other books of the same kind, published by Lecoffre, Palmé, Poussielgue, in the inevitable shagreen or sheep bindings stamped with dendriform patterns: Chantelouve was preparing his candidacy for the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, and hoped for the support of the party of the Ducs. That was why he received influential hypocrites, provincial Tartufes, and priests every week. He doubtless had to drive himself to do this, because in spite of his slinking slyness he was jovial and enjoyed a joke. On the other hand, he aspired to figure in the literature that counts at Paris, and he expended a good deal of ingenuity inveigling men of letters to his house on another evening every week, to make them his aides, or at least keep them from openly attacking him, so soon as his candidacy-an entirely clerical affair-should be announced. It was probably to attract and placate his adversaries that he had contrived these baroque gatherings to which, out of curiosity as a matter of fact, the most utterly different kinds of people came.
He had other motives. It was said that he had no scruples about exploiting his social acquaintances. Durtal had even noticed that at each of the dinners given by Chantelouve a well-dressed stranger was present, and the rumour went about that this guest was a wealthy provincial to whom men of letters were exhibited like a wax-work collection, and from whom, before or afterward, important sums were borrowed.
"It is undeniable that the Chantelouves have no income and that they live in style. Catholic publishing houses and magazines pay even worse than the secular, so in spite of his established reputation in the clerical world, Chantelouve cannot possibly maintain such a standard of living on his royalties.
"There simply is no telling what these people are up to. That this woman's home life is unhappy, and that she does not love the sneaky sacristan to whom she is married, is quite possible, but what is her real rôle in that household? Is she accessory to Chantelouve's pecuniary dodges? If that is the case I don't see why she should pick on me. If she is in connivance with her husband, she certainly ought to have sense enough to seek an influential or wealthy lover, and she is perfectly aware that I fulfil neither the one nor the other condition. Chantelouve knows very well that I am incapable of paying for her gowns and thus contributing to the upkeep of their establishment. I make about three thousand livres, and I can hardly contrive to keep myself going.
"So that is not her game. I don't know that I want to have anything to do with their kind of people," he concluded, somewhat chilled by these reflections. "But I am a big fool. What I know about them proves that my unknown beloved is not Chantelouve's wife, and, all things considered, I am glad she isn't."
CHAPTER VIII
Next day his ferment had subsided. The unknown never left him, but she kept her distance. Her less certain features were effaced in mist, her fascination became feebler, and she no longer was his sole preoccupation.
The idea, suddenly formed on a word of Des Hermies, that the unknown must be Chantelouve's wife, had, in fashion, checked his fever. If it was she-and his contrary conclusions of the evening before seemed hardly valid when he took up one by one the arguments by which he had arrived at them-then her reasons for wanting him were obscure, dangerous, and he was on his guard, no longer letting himself go in complete self-abandon.
And yet, there was another phenomenon taking place within him. He had never paid any especial attention to Hyacinthe Chantelouve, he had never been in love with her. She interested him by the mystery of her person and her life, but outside her drawing-room he had never given her a thought. Now ruminating about her he began almost to desire her.
Suddenly she benefited by the face of the unknown, for when Durtal evoked her she came confused to his sight, her physiognomy mingled with that which he had visualized when the first letters came.
Though the sneaking scoundrelism of her husband displeased him, he did not think her the less attractive, but his desires were no longer beyond control. In spite of the distrust which she aroused, she might be an interesting mistress, making up for her barefaced vices by her good grace, but she was no longer the non-existent, the chimera raised in a moment of uncertainty.
On the other hand, if his conjectures were false, if it was not Mme. Chantelouve who had written the letters, then the other, the unknown, lost a little of her subtlety by the mere fact that she could be incarnated in a creature whom he knew. Still remote, she became less so; then her beauty deteriorated, because, in turn, she took on certain features of Mme. Chantelouve, and if the latter had profited, the former, on the contrary, lost by the confusion which Durtal had established.
In one as in the other case, whether she were Mme. Chantelouve or not, he felt appeased, calmed. At heart he did not know, when he revolved the adventure, whether he preferred his chimera, even diminished, or this Hyacinthe, who at least, in her reality, was not a disenchanting frump, wrinkled with age. He profited by the respite to get back to work, but he had presumed too much upon his powers. When he tried to begin his chapter on the crimes of Gilles de Rais he discovered that he was incapable of sewing two sentences together. He wandered in pursuit of the Marshal and caught up with him, but the prose in which he wished to embody the man remained listless and lifeless, and he could think only patchily.
He threw down his pen and sank into an armchair. In revery he was transported to Tiffauges, where Satan, who had refused so obstinately to show himself, now became incarnate in the unwitting Marshal, to wallow him, vociferating, in the joys of murder.
"For this, basically, is what Satanism is," said Durtal to himself. "The external semblance of the Demon is a minor matter. He has no need of exhibiting himself in human or bestial form to attest his presence. For him to prove himself, it is enough that he choose a domicile in souls which he ulcerates and incites to inexplicable crimes. Then, he can hold his victims by that hope which he breathes into them, that instead of living in them as he does, and as they don't often know, he will obey evocations, appear to them, and deal out, duly, legally, the advantages he concedes in exchange for certain forfeits. Our very willingness to make a pact with him must be able often to produce his infusion into us.
"All the modern theories of the followers of Maudsley and Lombroso do not, in fact, render the singular abuses of the Marshal comprehensible. Nothing could be more just than to class him as a monomaniac, for he was one, if by the word monomaniac we designate every man who is dominated by a fixed idea. But so is every one of us, more or less, from the business man, all whose thoughts converge on the one idea of gain, to the artist absorbed in bringing his masterpiece into the world. But why was the Marshal a monomaniac, how did he become one? That is what all the Lombrosos in the world can't tell you. Encephalic lesions, adherence of the pia mater to the cerebrum, mean absolutely nothing in this question. For they are simple resultants, effects derived from a cause which ought to be explained, and which no materialist can
explain. It is easy to declare that a disturbance of the cerebral lobes produces assassins and demonomaniacs. The famous alienists of our time claim that analysis of the brain of an insane woman disclosed a lesion or a deterioration of the grey matter. And suppose it did! It would still be a question whether, in the case of a woman possessed with demonomania, the lesion produced the demonomania, or the demonomania produced the lesion… Admitting that there was a lesion! The spiritual Comprachicos have never resorted to cerebral surgery. They don't amputate the lobes-supposed to be reliably identified-after carefully trepanning. They simply act upon the pupil by inculcating ignoble ideas in him, developing his bad instincts, pushing him little by little into the paths of vice; and if this gymnastic of persuasion deteriorates the cerebral tissues in the subject, that proves precisely that the lesion is only the derivative and not the cause of the psychological state.
"And then, and then, these doctrines which consist nowadays in confounding the criminal with the insane, the demonomaniac with the mad, have absolutely no foundation. Nine years ago a lad of fourteen, Felix Lemaîre, assassinated a little boy whom he did not know. He just wanted to see the child suffer, just wanted to hear him cry. Felix slashed the little fellow's stomach with a knife, turned the blade round and round in the warm flesh, then slowly sawed his victim's head off. Felix manifested no remorse, and in the ensuing investigation proved himself to be intelligent and atrocious. Dr. Legrand Du Saule and other specialists kept him under vigilant surveillance for months, and could not discover the slightest pathological symptom. And he had had fairly good rearing and certainly had not been corrupted by others.
"His behaviour was like that of the conscious or unconscious demonomaniacs who do evil for evil's sake. They are no more mad than the rapt monk in his cell, than the man who does good for good's sake. Anybody but a medical theorist can see that the desire for good and the desire for evil simply form the two opposing poles of the soul. In the fifteenth century these extremes were represented by Jeanne d'Arc and the Marshal de Rais. Now there is no more reason for attributing madness to Gilles than there is for attributing it to Jeanne d'Arc, whose admirable excesses certainly have no connection with vesania and delirium.
Down There (Là-Bas) Page 10