Martyrs of Science

by S. Henry Berthoud

  At that moment, attendants came in with a coffin. They had come to remove the mortal remains of Jean Baudrais, in order to take them to the cemetery.

  One of the men bumped his leg on the copper cauldron, which was on the ground next to the table. He put his hand to his foot with the most expressive evidence of pain.

  A fortnight after that, Dr. Émile came to see me in Paris. I reproached him affectionately for having gone such a long time without visiting me.

  “It’s not my fault,” he replied, shaking my hand. I had to look after a poor fellow on my staff. He had a wound on his leg, insignificant in appearance; the negligence he showed on caring for it led to an inflammation; the inflammation caused ulceration and gangrene. In brief, I had to amputate the leg the day before yesterday.”

  “Did it go well?”

  “He’s gone to join Jean Baudrais,” he said, with a sigh.

  “What strange fatality is attached to the cauldron!” I exclaimed.

  Émile shrugged his shoulders. “There you go,” he said. “You poets seek the extraordinary everywhere; do you think the cauldron is bewitched? My poor fellow, examine with a little attention all the events in the life of any man, and you’ll see a similar chain of fatalities therein. Don’t you know that King Gustave III of Sweden died because his secretary broke his spectacles and couldn’t read his master a letter warning him about a conspiracy. Go back from cause to cause and you’ll arrive...”

  “At God,” I interjected.

  “That’s the conclusion to which I wanted to lead you,” the doctor replied, bowing respectfully before the august name that I had pronounced.”

  Translator’s afterword

  Salomon de Caus (1576-1626) was a Huguenot, and, in consequence, spent much of his life outside France, although he did work for Louis XIII as an engineer and architect; he never lived in Rouen. In a book published in 1615 Caus described a steam-driven pump, but it was not a new invention. The idea that it entitled him to be considered the true inventor of the steam engine was popularized by the 19th century scientist and statesman François Arago, but the contention is highly dubious. Thus the entire story-within-the-story told in “The Cauldron of Bicêtre” is a pure work of the imagination—as, indeed, the frame story ultimately represents it to be, although that narrative move might seem a trifle pusillanimous to some readers.

  The biography of Jean Baudrais (1749-1832) summarized by “Dr. Émile” is broadly accurate, except for the details of his death. He did, indeed, die in Bicêtre, of cholera, but did so three years before the story is set; he was admitted to Bicêtre because of his advanced age and his identity was not unknown to the staff there. He did not suffer from epilepsy, and there is no evidence that Napoléon had anything more against him than he had against the other 129 former Jacobins that he banished after the affair of the infernal machine.

  The witch’s cauldron is, unsurprisingly, a pure invention.

  THE SECOND SUN

  If there is a charming place in the world to take the waters, it is surely Spa. One finds in combination there all the picturesque qualities of wild nature and all the comforts of the most exquisite research. One can be a poet in the morning and an epicure in the evening—and only a few hours on the railway separates Spa from Paris.

  Here is the approximate genre of hygienic treatment followed by one of the so-called invalids who found himself at Spa fifteen years ago. A poor writer, pursued during the winter by balls, dramatic spectacles, study and the social whirlwind, in order to cure himself he needed pure air, verdant countryside, undemanding distractions and perhaps, strictly speaking, a little water extracted from a mineral spring.

  Thus, waking up late in the morning, he roamed the countryside, visited the magnificent manor of Justenville, sat down in the shade of the ruins of the old Château de Franchement, and always came back from these artistic excursions fairly early, so as not to miss the pleasures of the evening.

  Among the brilliant and joyful host that gathered at Spa, an old phantom of sorts was seen wandering, whose status as an invalid no one could conscientiously contest. Lazarus emerged from the tomb could surely not have displayed a more livid and emaciated face. Sometimes he followed fervently the prescriptions of the doctor who presides over the waters and seemed to be clinging to life with all his strength. At other times he threw himself into the most dangerous excesses, drinking like four Englishmen—not water, but wine—consuming his nights gambling, and passing disdainfully by the fuming waves of the fountain of Pouchon.

  The irregularity of the hygienic habits of the stranger was reproduced in his social habits. Sometimes he stayed alone and apart, and scarcely replied to the servants who asked for his instructions. At other times he was gracious, assiduous, amiable and witty with everyone, and caused the strangeness of his appearance to be forgotten by means of the section of his speech and the melodious softness of his voice.

  One day, when the Parisian feuilletonist was walking past the spring of Sauvenière, preoccupied by some novel or other whose idea he was developing, the stranger suddenly accosted him.

  “Monsieur,” he said, without any other preamble, “If you’re looking for a subject to write about, I’ll give you one that would, I think, lend itself to dramatic development in a singular fashion. Sit down here, if you please, and lend me your ear.

  “The story opens in Copenhagen...”

  The man of letters found the opening sufficiently original and unexpected for it to be worth the trouble of listening to the story. The old invalid, who expressed himself quite fluently in French, collected his thoughts for a few moments, placed his hands on his knees, and fixed the strange gaze of his large green-tinted eyes upon his auditor.

  The story, as I have just told you, Monsieur, begins in Copenhagen. No city in Europe, especially if one considers its population, has a greater number of colleges than Copenhagen. In 1479, Christian I founded an alma universitas with statutes drawn up by the Archbishop of Uppsala, endowments of land and various privileges. Christian II enriched it with wealth confiscated from the clergy. Christian VII increased the number of professors and modified the statutes in such a way as to rejuvenate them and render them useful and practicable. Today, numerous royal or private foundations give bursaries to two hundred pupils; a cloister serves as lodging for a hundred others, who also receive free books and food.

  The University of Copenhagen has a dozen extraordinary professors and sixteen ordinary ones; the rank and salary of the former correspond to the rank and salary of a major, without counting the four écus paid annually and personally by the majority of the pupils that they instruct.

  Doctor Magnussen had been the Extraordinary Professor of Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen for nineteen years, eleven months and two days when he fell gravely ill and died.

  The death of that man, one of the most knowledgeable in Denmark, whose modest and laborious life had been as honorable and pure before God as before men, left his widow and his daughter Stierna in a state verging on poverty. He bequeathed them nothing for a heritage by his library, a few scientific instruments, a little house in the suburbs and a sum of three or four hundred écus, which would give them an income of a hundred livres at the very most.

  In order to live, the two women had been counting on the pension to which the widows of professors were entitled after twenty years service on the part of their husbands. Alas, those twenty years were twenty-eight days short of accomplishment, and the rector, after consulting the other professors and the minister himself, declared to Madame Magnussen with tears in his eyes that the letter of the law had to be rigorously observed, and that she would not be inscribed on the pension list.

  The widow received this sad response to her application with more resignation that she had expected of herself. She accepted her fate courageously and resolved to live on her industry and handiwork.

  This proved more difficult to do than she thought. In vain she asked everyone she knew for embroidery work, or even d
ressmaking, but no one wanted to entrust a lady with work that professional seamstresses would inevitably do better and at a lower price. The resource on which the widow and her daughter were counting was therefore lacking; they decided, as a last resort, to take advantage of their house, and to let the dead man’s bedroom and library to two boarders.

  It cost Madame Magnussen a great deal to introduce strangers into her home in this way, and to become, in a way, their servant, but she was able to put so much dignity and noble simplicity into the manner in which she carried out her humble duties, that she only seemed more worthy of consideration and respect. Her first guests were, in any case, persons attached to the University and thus, so to speak friends.

  One of them was an old Extraordinary Professor who taught Theology, the other a young man appointed, by virtue of the modifications caused by the death of Dr. Magnussen, to the Ordinary chair of Medicine. His name was Bertel Granh, and did not take long to obtain pardon from the widow for his twenty-six years, thanks to his correct conduct, the mildness of his mores and his passionate love of study. He only came down from his room at meal-times, said a few kind words to Madame Magnussen, bowed timidly to Stierna, and, on leaving the table, returned to his scientific labor—unless it was a holiday, and he was invited to take tea in company with his old colleague and two or three friends of the professor’s widow.

  A year after her husband’s death, Madame Magnussen fell dangerously ill. Dr. Bertel Granh lavished his care upon her, so devotedly and so expertly that he succeeded in warding off the fever that had put the poor woman’s life in jeopardy. The recovery of the convalescent was celebrated by a family feast. Stierna embroidered a tobacco-pouch for Dr. Granh, and the latter resumed his solitary and laborious life as before.

  In the meantime, the old Extraordinary Professor completed the twenty years that gave him the right to retire from the University, and he resolved to spend the days that remained to him in the village where he had been born. The loss of the boarder was a significant matter in Madame Magnussen’s household, raising the serious question of how he might be replaced. Bertel, when consulted, proposed a new professor, a childhood friend, who had come to teach medicine in one of the University’s three Ordinary Chairs. Ole Matthiesen thus came to occupy the room that had fallen vacant, and was not long delayed, like his friend, in gaining the affection of their hostess.

  Good fortune seemed to have returned in full to the widow’s house, and her prayers thanked God every day for the consolations he deigned to accord her; a mother would not have been happier and more contented in the midst of her children than she was in the company of the two young men. Stierna lived alongside them as if she were their sister; she supervised the bleaching of their linen, put her care and pride into keeping it in good condition, and the last thing in the world she would have wanted was to leave them the least concern regarding their material life. You should have seen her in the morning, in her little corset and a short skirt, with her lovely arms bare, putting the cravats and vests she had just bleached out to dry on the washing-line in the courtyard, and hastening to make breakfast as soon as the cathedral clock struck seven-thirty. The two professors never had to wait a minute for their first meal, and they set off for the University afterwards with their arms fraternally linked, not without having received a maternal greeting from Madame Magnussen and a smile from Stierna’s rosy lips that said: “Au revoir!”

  When they came back at midday, the young woman had replaced her pretty morning garb with a dress that was simple, but did justice to the suppleness of her figure and left the smooth contour of her swan-like neck all its grace and purity. Ordinarily, she knotted her blonde hair with ashy gleams on top of her head, which thus left uncovered a forehead as white as ivory, on which an angelic serenity was ensconced. The large near-black lashes that veiled her blue eyes gave her naïve and noble physiognomy an expression of ineffable candor that had nothing terrestrial about it. That glint of another world, moreover, was evident in her entire person; her feet did not seem to be made for trampling earthly dust; her hands, before which Thorwaldsen37 would have knelt, retained a divine whiteness in spite of her domestic chores; finally, one could not hear her vibrant and melodious voice without being moved. Everything—including her name, Stierna, which means star in Danish—concurred in rendering that harmony of grace and celestial virginity more complete and irresistible.

  To see the two young professors going to the University, arm in arm, knowing that they had been childhood friends and were living under the same roof, one would naturally have believed them to be united by the most tender amity and the most absolute confidence. That was not the case, however. Under the appearances of a cordial fraternity, they lived more isolated from one another than if they had been separated by a great distance. Always ready to exchange the little services of which they might mutually have need, to settle a bill, to lend a book or to explain the obscure meaning of a difficult passage, they had never felt the need to say an affectionate word or to deposit in one another’s hearts the slightest intimate thought. Grave and melancholy during meals, scarcely raising their eyes toward Stierna, they only spoke to her in order to reply to her questions; Matthiesen never showed her more intimacy than Granh, and Granh made every effort never to cross the respectful limits at which Matthiesen stopped.

  Madame Magnussen and Stierna put no difference into their affection and their conduct with regard to the two lodgers—but in each of them, that fashion of acting was natural, while in the two young men it resulted from real calculation, tacit convention and a set purpose that would have been evident to souls less naïve and confident than those of the professors widow and her daughter.

  For two entire years, nothing changed, at least in appearance, in the relationships between these four individuals—except that Ole and Bertel became increasingly somber, and an amicable reproach from Madame Magnussen or an affectionate reprimand from Stierna could not always succeed in restoring a little serenity to their brows.

  The young woman and her mother attributed this sadness to the fatigue of study. As for the two professors, neither of them was unaware of the true cause of their mutual and somber depression. Each of them had read his comrade’s heart. However careful they were not to meet one another’s eyes, hazard occasionally brought the glances of hatred that they darted at one another into collision.

  One night, Ole Matthiesen, who could not sleep, had got out of bed and tried to distract himself with study, that opium which, perhaps better than any other, can numb the passions, suspend thought and daze the mind by means of intoxicating vertigo. Absorbed in his reading, he suddenly shivered, for the door opened abruptly and Berthel’s pale and somber face appeared.

  “We can’t go on living like this,” said the latter. “Don’t you agree, Ole Matthiesen?”

  “Yes, Berthel Granh,” Ole replied, getting to his feet to take down two pistols that were hanging on the wall. What you’ve just said, I’ve been thinking for a long time. When you came in, I was wondering whether I ought to go find you. The death of one of us, that’s what’s required.”

  “Listen to me, Ole—a duel would put the whole city in turmoil. The survivor would be lost forever, forced to renounce his title of professor, obliged to flee Demark or submit to the rigor of the law. He would only be satisfied in his hatred—and we want more than that, don’t we. Ole?”

  “I understand you, Bertel. Yes, let the hazards of chance decide between us. The one who is not favored must die, but die in secret, without anyone knowing his fate, without anyone in the world being able to discover what has become of him.”

  “That’s what I wanted to propose to you. Very well, pick up that Bible and that dagger I see in your belt. Here’s mine, for we’ve been wearing daggers for a year. In a few seconds, the cathedral bells will chime midnight. At the moment when the last chime begins to sound, we’ll each bury our blade in the pages of the book. The one who picks out the letter closest to the beginning of the alphabet wi
ll dispose of the destiny of the other.”

  They waited for a few moments in silence, their eyes lowered and their hearts pounding; then midnight began to chime. At the final stroke, they slid the daggers between the pages of the holy volume, profaned by their sanguinary pact. Each one search avidly for the letter picked out by his adversary.

  “A D!” cried Bertel.

  “You have a B,” Ole replied.

  A mortal silence fell between the two enemies. Ole was the first to break it. “So be it,” he murmured, in a low hoarse voice. “I will keep my word, and you shall never hear mention of me again. How much time will you give me?”

  “Three days.”

  “That’s more than I’ll need.” Ole added, with bitter irony: “You’re generous, Bertel—let me be.”

  Bertel went back to his room, his heart gripped by an iron hand. He felt a thousand times more miserable hand before. Far from soothing the distress he was suffering, the loss of Ole added to its harsh violence. He wanted to go back to his old friend and release him from his fatal promise, but he found the other’s door locked, and when he knocked and begged him to open it, not only did he receive no response, but Madame Magnussen, woken up by the unaccustomed noise came running, hastily clad in a dressing-gown, to ask anxiously whether Bertel felt ill. The latter, disconcerted, admitted an indisposition, and was obliged to resign himself to drinking strong herbal tea and submitting to the care of the worthy and obstinate woman until the moment when he could, without implausibility, assure her that he was no longer feeling poorly and that his illness had dissipated. Only then did Madame Magnussen go back to bed, congratulating herself on the success of her cure, and not without admiring more than ever the marvelous virtue of centaury38 tea for curing stomach cramps and nervous spasms.