Martyrs of Science

by S. Henry Berthoud

  “My God!” she cried. “My God, won’t you take pity on me? Won’t you return his reason to him before I die?”

  In the meantime, the physician was trying to understand the notes that the young woman had written. He could deduce the significance of the occasional word here and there, but the general meaning escaped him. He went out to search for someone who could give him an accurate translation.

  When he went back into the main room of the inn, he could not repress a start of joy; two travelers, recently arrived, were standing next to the fireplace. The accent of their pronunciation testified to an English origin. The physician handed them Diana’s note and asked them to translate it. One of the foreigners nonchalantly cast his eyes over the piece of paper, but he had scarcely read the first line than he handed it back to the physician.

  “A man obliged to flee his country is no compatriot of mine,” he said, harshly.

  “But what does it matter, Monsieur? You can’t refuse to translate that note for me. It’s a matter of an old man who needs care and a young woman who is dying. Not to tell me what this short letter means would make it impossible for me to give them help; it would prevent me from fulfilling the duties of my profession and of humanity. Perhaps it would be killing them!”

  Without replying, and as if they had not even heard, the two Englishmen straightened up, moved away from the table and sat down at the table where their dinner had just been served. Full of anger and indignation, the physician returned to the sick woman’s room.

  The latter guessed that her note had not been read; a burning tear, the last she was to shed, shone beneath her eyelid. She indicated her uncle to the physician, commended him to his care with a solemn and imploring gesture, and put her thin arms around the old man. The madman let her do it without understanding what was happening. The light of intelligence of which he had given evidence before now seemed totally extinct. He gazed at the physician anxiously and murmured his habitual phrases.

  “It wasn’t me! I didn’t do what they they’re accusing me of! Innocent! I’m innocent! Hide me! The people will throw stones at me! ‘Into the Thames! Into the Thames!’”

  Suddenly, Diana shivered. She raised her head, and a surge of joy lit up her face. She had just heard a few English words pronounced in the room next to hers. She pointed to the paper and signaled to the physician to go and ask for a translation. He replied by making her understand that he had already tried and had been refused.

  The young woman sat up on her bed with a painful effort. Although the doctor tried to dissuade her and hold her back, she put her feet on the floor. She tried to walk—or, rather to drag herself—to the room next door. Several times, her strength betrayed her, but she persisted in her aim nevertheless.

  When she went into the room where the foreigners were, one might have thought her a phantom emerging from the tomb; even the Englishmen, in spite of their natural phlegm, their apathetic insouciance and their cruel refusal, could not avoid emotion at the sight of the dying woman, so young and so beautiful. She handed the piece of paper to them and begged them, with a supplicant gesture, to translate its contents for the physician.

  One of them took the note and was about to do what she asked when he suddenly saw her totter and fall. The physician ran to catch her. She murmured a few unintelligible words, raised her eyes and extended her hand toward the room where the old man was, and exhaled a long sigh.

  “God has taken pity on her suffering,” the physician said, taking the poor child’s pulse. “He has recalled her to him.”

  The disorder and trouble caused in the hostelry by the lugubrious event of a death occurring in such dire circumstances is easily imaginable. While the Englishmen and the women hastened to get away from the sad sight, the servants helped the doctor transport the corpse to the old man’s apartment. The latter did not understand the sad reality of the scene that was unfolding before his eyes. On seeing so many people arrive in his presence, he took refuge in a corner, not without murmuring and repeating incessantly: “It wasn’t me! It wasn’t me! Don’t throw stones at me! I’m innocent. ‘Into the Thames! Into the Thames!’”

  Habituated as the physician was to the sight of death and the lugubrious scenes accompanying it, he could not repress a sharp emotion on seeing the cadaver of the young woman, whose gaze still seemed to be searching for the old man, to protect him. Piously, he put a veil over her face, still beautiful in spite of death, and went to meet the hotelier to discuss with him what was to be done with the old man who had found himself suddenly abandoned in such a fatal manner.

  The hotel proprietor was busy settling the account with the English travelers, who getting ready to leave immediately.

  “What, Messieurs!” cried the doctor. “One of your compatriots has just died; an old man of your nation remains without protection; you could provide some information about him, and instead of doing so, you’re in haste to quit Toulouse!”

  The two foreigners, like men anticipating annoyance, fuss and perhaps delay, made no response, paid their bill, climbed into their carriage and gave the coachman the order to leave.

  “What are you going to do with the old man?” the physician asked the landlord.

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I’ll send for the justice of the peace. He’ll draw up the official report. He’ll examine the man’s papers and dispose of him as he thinks it appropriate. Do you think I can turn my hotel into a hospital? It’s bad enough to have a death. Now two travelers have left because they don’t want to stay under the same roof as a corpse. If other clients arrive and find out what lies in that room, they’ll go away and lodge somewhere else. I hope to God that I can get rid of such guests very quickly!”

  He did, indeed, go in search of the justice of the peace immediately; the latter did not take long to arrive. At first he wanted to seal the room, but the host judiciously observed that the formality in question would only apply to his own furniture, given that the foreigners had not brought any trunk. The only thing they possessed was the post-chaise in the courtyard that had brought them.

  Indeed, no luggage as found in the apartment. A purse containing eight or ten gold coins was all that the foreigners had.

  The justice of the peace then beckoned the old man forward. The latter had taken refuge in a corner, according to his insensate habit. It was almost necessary to use violence to bring him before the magistrate.

  “What is your name?” the judge asked him, in English, being able to speak that language.

  The old man hid his face in his hands and obstinately refused to reply.

  “At least you won’t refuse to tell me the name of the young woman who has just died,” said the magistrate, hoping by that stratagem to get some enlightenment from the madman.

  The old man shuddered. “Dead! He said dead! Diana’s dead!”

  He threw himself toward the bed, lifted up the veil covering the young woman’s face and shivered from head to toe on seeing her motionless and marked with the fatal seal of death. They thought momentarily that the redoubtable spectacle was about to return him to reason, but he only stammered a few inconsequential words; sobs escaped his bosom, and he ended up kneeling beside the bed.

  “Well?” said the magistrate. “What is the young woman’s name?”

  “Diana! Diana!” murmured the madman.

  “Is she your child or a relative?”

  “My child, yes, the child of my heart. For me, she has renounced her homeland, her family, her fiancé. She followed me into exile. She’s dead!”

  “Why have you left your homeland, then? What reasons forced you into exile?”

  That question threw the old man’s ideas, which had seemed to recover some clarity, into confusion again.

  “The people!” he said. “The people! Stones, cries, curses! ‘Into the Thames! Into the Thames!’ Oh, how cruel the injustice of her country was to a noble heart! Why am I not dead? There’s no rest, except in the tomb. Fortunate Diana, who can rest!”

  �
�But in France, a foreign country, you have nothing to fear from our compatriots. Tell me your name, as I’m required to record it by the law.”

  “The law! The law! Oh, I know that, he law! Judges who interrogate with perfidious skill, who lay traps into which one falls. Black-hearted men who only say ‘you’re innocent’ after telling the entire nation of what you were accused. And then the nation doesn’t want to believe in that innocence! The people are there with shouts and stones…it’s necessary to hide, like a shame, the glory of the name that one made illustrious by so much effort, at the price of such difficult labor. Leave me alone, leave me alone: I have no name; I don’t have one anymore.”

  After making further and lengthy attempts, the magistrate had to give up trying to obtain enlightenment from the old man, which his flagrant state of dementia would, in any case, have deprived of any legal value. The justice of the peace drew up the death certificate of a young Englishwoman known only as Diana. As for the old man, he decided that everything belonging to him—which is to say, the post-chaise—should be sold on his behalf, and that he should be placed in a lunatic asylum until someone came to claim him, with further measures to be decided later, if no one presented himself to take charge of him.

  The hotel proprietor asked the justice of the peace to take the old man away from his inn immediately.

  “The presence of a madman in my establishment,” he contended, “might lead to unfortunate incidents. If he becomes violent, I have no means of restraining him. He might start breaking my furniture and trying to flee.”

  The magistrate yielded to this judicious reasoning and ordered the two policemen he had brought with him to take the foreigner to a hospice that he designated to them. The two men immediately went to carry out the order they had received. They found the old man sitting by Diana’s bed, plunged into a profound meditation. They gestured to him to go with them. He smiled, signaled to them to speak more quietly, and pointed at the corpse.

  “Shh! She’s asleep, don’t wake her. I’ll go with you as soon as she’s had enough sleep. It would be a cruelty to wake her. She’s had so much fatigue and chagrin to bear!”

  The policemen conferred with a glance, slipped behind the foreigner, grabbed him abruptly and started to drag him away. Then he resisted, crying out, and gave evidence of a vigor that one would not have suspected from his paltry appearance. The struggle went on for a long time. Exasperated by several blows they had received, the policemen ended up throwing their adversary on to the bed. There they succeeded in tying him up. Then they loaded him on to their shoulders and carried him away.

  During the frightful struggle, Diana’s body had been tipped on to the floor and trampled underfoot. It was thus that it was found by the old woman charged by the justice of the peace with rendering the final duties to the foreigner’s mortal remains. Alone, she wrapped her in a shroud and deposited her in a coffin, after having taken her jewelry and cut off her beautiful blonde hair, in order to sell it.

  “The dead,” she said, with a frightful smile, “have no need of hair.”

  The following evening, the coffin was taken to the cemetery without any religious ceremony, for they did not know whether the dead woman belonged to the Catholic religion or the Protestant faith. A grave awaited her in a corner reserved for paupers; she was put in it, and then it was filled with earth.

  And it was all over.

  Some time afterwards, a post-chaise arrived in the courtyard of the hotel where Diana had died. Two young men were in the carriage. They had scarcely exchanged a few words with the proprietor when the latter saw them go pale and give the most profound evidence of disturbance and dolor.

  “My sister! My poor sister!” cried the younger of the two.

  “Diana! My dear unfortunate fiancée!” murmured the other, who was visibly on the brink of fainting.

  They immediately ordered that the Diana’s brother be taken to the hospice where his uncle was detained, and his companion to the cemetery where Diana was buried.

  At the cemetery, it was necessary for the gravedigger to search for a long time for the place where the requested body lay. So many young women had been buried in the course of a month!

  At the hospice, no searching was necessary. A register was opened and the reply was made: “Number 3,623. An old man, assumed to be English, age and domicile unknown. Deceased 28 May 1828.”

  Two corpses! Of that beautiful and pure young woman, and that great and illustrious citizen, nothing remained but two cadavers! Alas! What malady, then, had struck the old man?

  The attendant consulted his notes and read out: “Furious dementia. From the moment of his incarceration he never ceased to give evidence of extreme agitation. Violent fever. Refusal to take nourishment. Death. At autopsy, inflammation of the meninges of the brain; tubercules on the lungs.”

  The young Englishman withdrew in consternation. The attendant called him back.

  “Monsieur, will you tell me the name of the deceased. It’s important to record the name in the establishment’s record of deaths.”

  “It’s an illustrious name, Monsieur. The unfortunate who died in a lunatic asylum, struggling in the shackles of a straitjacket, was one of the most celebrated citizens of Great Britain. Great Britain has killed him with its ingratitude and its injustice. Record the name of Sir William Congreve.”

  “The inventor of the terrible rockets that bear his name?”

  “You are only citing one of his entitlements to renown, and not the most glorious, for, if it served to ensure the defense and military might of his country, it can only be regarded, after all, as a means of destruction. Thank God, I can cite with pride other inventions as admirable and more useful. Our whalers owe him a device that removes all the perils from whale-hunting and almost all the fatigue. He has given our powder-factories improvements that tend to the prodigious. He has created a motor in which water combined with air can produce a prodigious force. Thanks to him, the counterfeiting of banknotes has become impossible.

  “Finally, he was completing studies that would have given the world an invention designed to allow ships to be maneuvered at sea without sails, without masts and without the resources of steam-power. A deadly and fatal blow, struck by calumny and ingratitude, has interrupted that endeavor abruptly, and permanently, and has annihilated them.

  “Wretches accused Sir William Congreve of an odious and implausible fraud. Nevertheless, the superintendent of the Tower of London required the old man who had sat several times as a member of parliament, the great inventor admitted into the bosom of the Royal Society, to sit in the dock of the court of chancellery. That court, after long and dolorous debates, proclaimed my uncle’s innocence, but public faith had been deceived and the opinion of the citizens perverted. At the end of the hearing, a blind and furious populace, determined to see Sir William’s acquittal as an injustice and unworthy partiality for a powerful man, assailed him, insulted him, threw mud and stones at him, pursued him with odious clamors, and wanted to throw him into the Thames. He only escaped by a miracle.

  “So much injustice troubled Sir William’s reason; the light of that great genius darkened and vacillated, alas. Imagine my despair. Imagine the dolor that struck our entire family. It was decided, on the advice of several celebrated physicians, that my uncle should leave immediately for the continent. It was hoped that absence, the change of location and the distraction of traveling might lead to a fortunate amelioration of Sir William’s mental condition, and might even bring about a complete cure. Imperious affairs, on which my honor and my fortune depended, retained me in London for some time. Diana, my sister, engaged to a young man she loved, ready to contract a marriage that one the prosecution brought against Sir William had delayed, did not hesitate to devote herself to her uncle, and departed with him.

  “We saw them draw away, hearts full of hope, with the certainty that my uncle would soon return to continue his work, and my sister to receive her fiancé’s pledge at the altar. A domestic atta
ched to Sir William’s service accompanied those two dear individuals and assured them—at least, we thought so—of loyal, intelligent and efficacious protection...

  “Do you know how that wretch justified our trust? He abandoned Diana, dying, and Sir William, without resources. He robbed them. The lure of two or three hundred pounds sterling led him to commit the most cowardly and odious crime. It was tantamount to murder.

  “That last blow finished poor Diana, who was exhausted by fatigue and grief. Vanquished by absence, always in the presence of the sad spectacle of madness, she could not resist, and succumbed. And no one was there to collect her last sigh, no friendly hand to hold her hand at the moment of the supreme adieu. Isolation, abandonment and despair were seated beside her death-bed. But at least it was not in a hospice, it was not bound in the ignoble folds of a straitjacket, it was not confounded with the insane that she rendered her last sigh. She had a coffin. Her remains were not, like my uncle’s, thrown into a common ditch, where it will be impossible to recognize them in order to give them a tomb.”

  A week later—for the legal formalities could not be completed more rapidly—two coffins, one covered with a black cloth, the other with a white one, and placed in a hearse, left Toulouse in the midst of a crowd that had gathered to see the funeral cortege.

  But that curiosity was nothing by comparison with the emotion that excited London in the middle of the month of May. The streets were overflowing with people dressed in mourning; even the poor had found the means of procuring scraps of crepe to put on their hats. Everyone headed urgently toward the shores of the Thames, on the bank of which, at the place most appropriate for a disembarkation, a large and plush catafalque had been established, draped with velvet with lavish silver embroideries.

  On the part where the coffin would rest temporarily, a coat of arms surmounted with a baronial crown was visible. Beneath it was a depiction of Britannia, kneeling piously and seemingly shedding tears, while a statue of Gratitude, arms full of palms and civic crowns, advanced to cover the illustrious deceased with them. Members of the regiment of the Coldstream Guards, in ceremonial uniform, with crepes on their drums, surrounded the catafalque and protected it against the unprecedented flood of curiosity-seekers who were trying to get closer to it.