Nora, The Ape-Woman

by Félicien Champsaur

  “Thank you, Fortin, but you’re forgetting that I’ve withdrawn completely into the shadows. I think I have something that would suit you much better. What would you say to Ernest Paris?”

  “An idea of genius!” exclaimed Fortin, tapping him on the thigh. “Voronoff is feeling him out just now for a graft. God’s chamber pot! He’s exactly the man we need! With him, Narcisse will find himself in an intellectual milieu, and, as Ernest Paris is becoming increasingly lazy, Narcisse will give him a hand to finish the book, Le Vrai Jésus, which he announced such a long time ago.

  “Well, you can consider it as done. Ernest Paris can’t refuse me; then again, Narcisse’s physique is bound to please him, for, by contrast, that old white biped horse will look like an Apollo.”

  VI. Two Great Men at Liberty

  The fourth night of May was particularly beautiful. So, on leaving Madame de Virmile’s house, where he had spent the evening, Ernst Paris had a whim to go back to the Avenue Foch on foot. He had just met Dr. Jean Fortin, the Marquise’s brother, at his old friend’s house, for Madame de Virmile, in spite of her appearance of old nobility, had been born simply Fortin, of which she was much less proud than of her pearly crown. The doctor only came to his sister’s house very rarely, so Ernest Paris had been glad to find him there, and it was, in sum, the pleasure of chatting one-to-one with the illustrious scientist that inclined him toward a nocturnal pedestrian stroll. The air was sweet and mild, the young leaves exuding a fresh odor of new sap. Paris passed his arm beneath that of the scientist, and they both set forth; the two automobiles followed meekly.

  “It’s a stroke of luck for me to have encountered you this evening, my dear Fortin, I’ve been wanting to see you for a long time. Why do you never come to visit me?”

  “I have so little free time. It’s necessary for me to be absolutely forced to see my sister over some matter of interest, and then not for long—the Marquise prefers seeing my heels to my face.”

  “You remind our dear Marquise of her humble origins. Did you hear her going on about the celebrations organized in Orléans and Paris from the ninth of May to Sunday the twelfth, for the fifth centenary of Jeanne d’Arc. Fundamentally, she doesn’t care a fig about the Maid of Orléans, but she’s made it into a question of politics, a party matter. She’s more royalist than the king!”

  “Yes. Once again the clergy are profiting from the occasion. So why have the imbeciles of the parliamentary swamp established a national holiday to celebrate a humble hysterical peasant whom the clergy want to make into a saint? Sanctify the Maid! It’s diabolically clever.”17

  “Those people are always very strong, and our governments always cut rods for their own back. French ineptitude in full swing. The road to Reims is being marked out with plaques; statues to St. Jeanne d’Arc are being raised everywhere; flags, processions, illuminations... But you, Doctor, believe, medically, that the legendary individual was merely a neurotic, a hysteric? In any case, some people claim that a whore was substituted for Jeanne d’Arc in her prison, and that the Maid, liberated, went on to have children.”

  “It’s obvious. Every era has individuals thus disposed, in their youth, to act beyond reason—and it still goes on. It’s a kind of madness that, although innocent in appearance, can create fanatical murderers when overexcited by political passions.”

  “The Maid has always intrigued me somewhat. If the subject hadn’t been done to death I’d have been tempted to write a few pages about her. I can’t stomach all this stupidity. The pages in question remain in the limbo of my consciousness, like the book that’s been announced everywhere, Le Vrai Jésus.”

  “You have a passion for stirring up all these old frog-ponds! What can these old legends, denuded of all interest, matter to our generation, which has already learned useful things? A legend! One can dress it up any way one likes!”

  “Stop there, my dear friend. Don’t blaspheme against legend; that’s perhaps the truest thing in the history of the world, if only because legend can lend itself to any fantasy, whereas, in order to write history, one is the butt of continual contradictions. Look, since we’ve put the Maid in the dock, will you permit me a few hypotheses that will link the past with our era? I’ll be careful not to submit them to our lovely Marquise.”

  “Go ahead,” said Dr. Fortin. He sensed that Ernest Paris was entirely disposed to sustain the controversy indefinitely, and did not really want to take part in it.

  “Jeanne d’Arc,” the speaker commenced, “whom legend credits with saving France, in fact, only saved the monarchy. After the liberation of Orléans, which wasn’t very difficult, what was the first concern of God’s envoy? Was it to fight the English? Not at all. It was to go and have Charles VII crowned in Reims. It was necessary, in that era when royalty had real value, for the king to be crowned in order to oppose genuine force to the Angevin dynasty of the Plantagenets. It was also to rally the French aristocracy, who, until then, had sold themselves to the highest bidder. Let’s pass on. That’s not where I want to get to. There was no battle between two peoples, but only a legal quarrel over succession between two feudal houses, the Valois and the Plantagenets.

  “Let’s suppose that the Valois had been defeated and the English—who already possessed the entire south-west of France and a large part of the north, including Paris—had been victorious. Let’s look at the consequences of that apparent defeat: firstly, today, we’d no longer think that, after centuries of Roman conquest, the Gaulois were only thinking about Gaul, any more than that, later, they didn’t take any account of the Frankish conquest. People adapt themselves to events and, as time passes, even everything out. Which gives us, with regard to the question of patriotism, a duration of a few centuries; at the end of that time, people have forgotten what they were and assimilated themselves to the new life...”

  “Well, then,” said Dr. Fortin, “Charles VII and his great vassals, vanquished and submissive to the law of the stronger, as you seem to desire, have recognized the sovereignty of English law. So what?”

  “Although a people doesn’t change its mores and its language very quickly, inevitably, the greater number impose themselves on the smaller. The English would be frenchified, and the French anglicized. Result: the fusion of two rival nations into a single whole, each collaborating in accordance with its genius and dominating the rest of Europe by means of a maritime littoral to which the rest of the world is submissive. It’s quite evident that the north would join, spontaneously or forcibly, that industrial and intellectual nucleus; so the Belgians, the Dutch, the Danes and the Swedes fuse with the Anglo-French, and, by contact, attract the Latin peoples. What can the peoples of the center do, stifled by that iron belt? They unite with it, and the United States of Europe is realized. Consequence: all the wars of various duration are avoided, until the present day; peoples not divided by hatreds born of intestinal struggles—especially the last war of 1914-19, a war disastrous for the victors and vanquished alike; and finally, the employment of a universal language, English, throughout the world.”

  “You’re going a bit far, my dear and paradoxical friend. If our diehard patriots could hear you…!”

  “I’ll go further still. If humankind were less stupid; if there weren’t so many various parties; if universal egotism were replaced by a spirit of cooperation; if humankind finally understood its true interest; if we even understood our own affairs outside all our petty chapels, what do you think we would do if we were wise?”

  “Speak! Perhaps, my dear, you’re about to resolve a great problem.”

  “Huh! Unfortunately, it’s only a fantasy, which would be treated humorously if I, Ernest Paris of the Académie Française, published it. Well, if France were intelligent, she would do what the Savoyards have done; she would give herself to the strongest. She would give herself to America, and by that means, liquidate her debt. Notice that if France doesn’t offer herself to John Bull, she’ll fall into the power of America regardless, because America, being too ri
ch, is placing her capital in Europe and becoming its proprietor. Have you calculated how much territory England and America have bought in Europe, particularly in France, since the great and ignoble war? I’ll wager it’s a twentieth, and, thanks to the elevation of the exchange rate, our allies will continue. They have a stranglehold on all the markets in the world, send them up and down at will. Within a century, if we’re not careful, the old world will belong to the new.18

  “What would happen, on the other hand, if, in accordance with the hypothesis I put forward just now, France offered herself benevolently to America and nailed her tricolor flag to the stars and stripes?

  “Firstly, the liquidation of the debt; and then, by virtue of the attraction of our civilization, our Latin spirit, which will always be superior to all others, the fusion would take place, I believe, to our advantage. In the same way that the juice of the vine is bound to replace cold and heavy beer, the Gallic spirit will put an end to glacial and hypocritical Lutheran dogmas, to make way for the mild philosophy of our forefathers.

  “There are two methods of conquest without cannon: conquest by money and conquest by religion. Religions have been killed by bigotry, by the diffusion of schisms; money alone is an uncontested master. However, money can only reign by constantly making dupes. The man who gains ruins three of four associates, often more; and America is the mistress of that order of things. Fortunes are made and unmade continually there. Why? Because her people, which was not one to begin with, being a composite of all the races of the old world, has but one aim: money; and money for its own sake, not the pleasures that it can bring.

  “That young world, which does not known how to live, requires education by the old, the only one capable of idealism, of enthusiasm for the just and the beautiful. Races that have only practical ends need to be coupled with prodigal races. That’s why I sustain that France ought to add herself to the United States of America, and that, if she leads the way, the other states will follow her example, and then we shall have the United States of the World!”

  “I’ll align myself frankly with your idea, my dear friend—but as you said just now, someone other than me might not take it seriously.”

  “Because people are stupid. In French blood—and, I dare say, that of all countries—successive invasions have completely drowned that of the primitive. Who among us can boast of having pure Gallic blood in his veins? All the peoples in our territory are mixtures, since the Romans issued from the Greeks to the Germans issued from the races of the North and East—not forgetting the Arabs, the Spaniards, the English and the Normans. The only pure races that still exist, very nearly, are those of Indonesia and Oceania. What sense, then, is there in our nationalism? Who can boast of being a pure Frenchman? And even then, the Franks came from Germany; the sons are enemies of their ancestors. Conclusion: patriotism is ridiculous in confrontation with reason. People quarrel and kill one another for a label stuck on a street-corner. Anyone who crosses that boundary is my enemy, and I have the right and the duty to murder him. Confess, my dear doctor, that an intelligent man cannot recognize such doctrines!”

  “I agree entirely—but what you’re saying to me, whom you know to be an internationalist, you wouldn’t dare to write.”

  Ernest Paris started laughing. “Certainly not! Not like that. I’d be stoned. Which doesn’t alter the fact that, if we’re in a mess, it’s the fault of Jeanne d’Arc!”

  “Here we are at your door. I’ll go back to my car. Come and see me in Saint-Cloud, at the Red Nest. I won’t talk to you about some social question or other, but good scientific verities.”

  “That’s all that raises the priority of modern humans above the animals. Intellectually, they’re well below the level of the ancient Greeks and Romans.”

  “How do we know? We judge the ancients by the elite of the nation; it’s as if one judged the French mind by the elite of ours: Voltaire, Rousseau, Molière, Rabelais, Montaigne, Victor Hugo and others. The great mass of people was doubtless no more intelligent than ours.”

  “I like to believe otherwise.”

  “Having preferences proves nothing. You’re judging the minds of two or three thousand years ago. You know as well as I do, however, that there were other anterior civilizations that were worth as much.”

  “In sum, my dear Fortin, I think the stupid fraction of humankind doesn’t merit others thinking on its behalf.”

  “To whom are you speaking? Marc Vanel and I have tried to take an interest in it. Pooh! I still have nausea. You know that a large part of my life has been taken up by the study of mental function in human beings. I’ve demonstrated to the public that the human self can be removed, displaced and exchanged between people, forewarned or not—which is to say, with their consent or against their will. Of what is the force of influence that can thus vanquish the will comprised? We’ve given it the name of magnetism, or hypnotism, but in reality that force remains rather enigmatic.

  “There are fluidic forces escaping the magnetizer to influence the magnetized. An example: throw a stone into a pond. Ripples spread out from the point of the fall to the limits of the pool. Throw a stone into the middle of the Ocean, and the same phenomenon occurs. Produce a vibration in the air, and the same thing will happen. The vibration extends to infinity, without limits, more and more attenuated for our ears, the more distant it is from us, but having the same force everywhere that the sonorous vibration passes. Starting from that viewpoint, it might be the same with thought, with psychological force. It simply requires thought to propagate like sound, light and electric waves.

  “That is, for me and my collaborator Marc Vanel, habitually very easy. Many times, Homo-Deus and I have practiced, on ourselves and others, the exteriorization of the self. It was therefore necessary to fix that exteriorization by some means, wasn’t it? That means, we’ve found—and that’s the key to our discovery: enclosed in our brain, the psychic wave that escapes, for example, from my brain, can only be perceived by a brain whose self is similarly exteriorized. Then, the two minds can enter into communication and understand one another. For them, distance no longer exists, and the undulation of thought extends without boundaries and without limits. Without limits! That’s the hypothetical side of P.T.C.”

  “Psycho-Telepathic Communication—yes, I know,” said Ernest Paris.

  “The future of the science is the utilization of the formidable movement of waves that surrounds us and escapes from all living beings, and all metals. The atom itself, you know, is nothing but a movement of rays, of radiation, reminiscent, in miniature, of the movement of stars in the universe...”

  Dr. Fortin perceived that Ernest Paris was beginning to become inattentive to that scientific verbiage, and was contemplating the stars amorously.

  “But enough about that subject, my dear. You know that you’re still expected at Voronoff’s. He has an ape reserved for you. Good night, my friend. Dream of the regeneration of peoples—and your own!”

  The two men, Ernest Paris and Jean Fortin, looked at one another for a moment in silence. Each one was following his own thought or dream—they were, at any rate, a long way from one another, on the deserted Avenue Foch, where their autos were waiting for them.

  They shook hands, and Jean Fortin climbed into his car in order to go back to his house at Saint-Cloud, the Red Nest.

  “Don’t forget that Voronoff’s expecting you,” the doctor repeated, as an adieu to his companion.

  Ernest Paris made a sign of ironic acquiescence. Fortin’s auto pulled away in the direction of Saint-Cloud, and the novelist Ernest Paris, of the Académie Française, went back into his house, in the peaceful Villa Saïd,19 to which the mild nocturnal breeze coming from the nearby Bois de Boulogne was bringing the freshness of spring.

  VII. Nora Before Nora

  One day Nora received a strange visit.

  Berthe, her chambermaid, brought her a visiting card:

  ABRAHAM GOLDRY

  Professor of Anthropology, University o
f Philadelphia

  “Goldry!” the dancer exclaimed; but my name is Goldry too! What if it’s my father! Send him in...”

  She advanced to meet the visitor.

  “Excuse my indiscretion,” said the doctor, bowing to the dancer. “I’ve authorized myself to make this visit because of a similarity of names, which, if I’m not mistaken, might renew a relationship between us broken some time ago.”

  “I believe so too,” said Nora, “for your face brings back vague memories.”

  “Are you the Nora Goldry who ran away from the convent of Saint-Pleur at Gadijoz?”

  “Yes,” the young woman stammered. “And you must be…my father.”

  “No! That is to say…one never knows. But I am your father by adoption, and it’s by that entitlement that I’ve come to put myself at your disposal, in case I can be useful to you.”

  “I had an instant of hope! You adopted me you say? Then you knew my family?”

  “Yes…that is to say, almost.”

  “I don’t understand—explain. What is your objective is coming to see me?”

  “To assure myself that my friend, Dr. Jean Fortin, was not mistaken in notifying me of your probable identity.”

  “Well, now you’re informed. So, what do you want from me?”

  “As I told you, my dear Nora, to place myself at your disposal. I adopted you, child; will you refuse to allow me to continue the role of father that I once filled with such scant success?”

  “In fact, I committed an act of ingratitude toward you—but I truly don’t have the courage to regret it. In any case, the isolation in which you left me authorized it to some extent. Don’t you agree?”

  “I too don’t permit myself the slightest reproach—but since hazard has brought us together, would you not like to have some affection for the person whose name you bear?”