Martyrs of Science

by S. Henry Berthoud

  “The position of the negative pole was changed; when it was placed beneath the navel, he cadaver seemed to have recovered a complete existence. A candle presented to the nostrils was blown out by the force of the respiration; the arms stirred; the legs and thighs trembled; the eyelids parted to allow a glimpse of vitreous eyes. Finally, all of a sudden, Cobler propped himself up on his elbow, extended his arm and raised his head. The operator who was moving the negative pole over the subject recoiled in horror. One might have thought that the cadaver had been resuscitated.”

  I will spare you the scientific details of the experiments that the Lancaster committee continued to make. Of considerable interest to professionals, they would have none for those who demand excitement or distraction from these informal pieces. After two hours of conversation, the doctor and his companion took their leave of the English physician, who recounted such frightful thing with his imperturbable self-composure, his white hands, his pink cheeks and his blond hair, who had gone up on to the scaffold during an execution in order to study a man’s final convulsions at close range, to place his hand on the dying man’s heart, to count its pulsations and feel their gradual extinction.

  “You look pale, my friend,” said the doctor, as we left.

  “Anyone would. What purpose do these atrocious experiments serve?”

  “The discovery of a few traces of the great secret of life,” he replied. “God only delivers the faintest fragments of his divine secrets to perseverance, courage and hard work. Science makes people cruel. If you knew how many animals’ lives the study of the slightest organic phenomena costs every day…there are poor dogs that die of starvation, others that expire half-dissected. In a book that my celebrate colleague Dr. Amussat has published on the introduction of air into the veins,61 he recounts ingenuously that his experiments have inflicted cruel tortures on and killed thousands of rabbits, whole packs of dogs, herds of horses and flocks of sheep.

  “It’s true that, unlike the Americans, we haven’t yet gone as far as to deliver humans to the executioners; we content ourselves with carrying out amputations in crowded amphitheaters and teaching at the bedsides of the dying. But I repeat, that is the price of knowledge; it’s take it or leave it; there’s no other choice. The end sanctifies the means.

  “In any case, believe me, however habituated one becomes to such things, the heart is never blasé about them. It requires more courage than one might think to draw a scalpel over a poor creature struck by illness, and whose existence often depends on the composure with which one operates. So the profession of surgeon, noble as its objective is, demands an abnegation and a devotion that the world at large does not suspect, and to which it which its shows itself too unjust.

  “Here we are back on the boulevard. Resume your walk and your pleasant idling. Me, I’m going to visit the sick, to listen to complaints and make ingrates.”

  THE STORY OF A TREE IN THE CHAMPS-ÉLYSÉES

  In the Champs-Élysées, not far from the crossroads, there is an elm tree that I thought in my youth the most beautiful tree in the row; on its own, it shaded almost everything around.

  Originating from the Trianon nursery, that tree was uprooted from its native soil in 1759 and transplanted to the location it occupies today. It was about ten years old then, and its slender form was somewhat reminiscent, I must admit, of a beanpole. With its roots laid bare, mutilated and stripped of their native soil, with its trunk jolted on a rickety cart, and its bark bruised and damaged, the poor thing arrived at its destination.

  A hole was dug in the ground, which was both sticky with clay and full of stones, as well as could be contrived, and it was planted there as it was, abandoned to the grace of God.

  It was under the direction of the famous botanist Thouin62 that the plantation was accomplished; his methods seem rather crude today, but they were sincerely admired in the epoch when he put them to work.

  In such poor conditions, the elm languished for some time, without anyone worrying about it unduly. In the early years, it only bore a yellow, meager and belated foliage that did not last long. Over time, nevertheless, with the aid of the vigor of youth, it ended up getting the upper hand. It plunged some of its roots into the utmost depths of the terrain, while it extended others near the surface, horizontal, gnarly and branching, organized like stems and endowed with marvelous powers of suction. It was seen to grow tall and stout, to become verdant, and take on proportions both elegant and robust.

  Unfortunately, when that salutary crisis occurred, political events were subject to great upheavals; royalty was unsteady, the Marquis de La Fayette had already made his appearance.63 A street-urchin, who much preferred patriotic ovations to the endeavors of his workshop, tore off the elm’s most beautiful branches in order to throw them under the feet of the white horse of the hero of two worlds.

  The poor tree, bruised and broken, covered with gaping wounds that let its sap flow out, almost died for a second time—but good times soon followed. Throughout the Revolution, and even during the Consulate and the early years of the Empire, it lived peacefully in a profound solitude and forgetfulness, without anyone even thinking of pruning its lush branches, which grew at their whim, here and there, high up and low down, in every direction, and ended up forming a dense and inextricable vault of verdure in which flocks of sparrows, finches and wood-pigeons nested. It even flowered. A scientist, who doubtless had nothing better to do, amused himself by counting its seeds, and found three hundred and twenty-nine thousand of them. Let us admit, however, that not a single one of those seeds grew, and that they served as pasture for all the birds resident in the branches.

  No one passed close to the elm, except for the aforementioned scientist, and, occasionally, the infamous inhabitants of the Allée des Veuves and the infamous dens of vice that surrounded the ill-reputed quarter. One day, in fact, an old man was found at the foot of the tree, bathed in his own blood, riddled with stab-wounds and robbed of his watch and his purse; it was the unfortunate botanist. But no one paid any heed to him or gave any thought to delivering his murderers to the law. In those days, similar crimes were committed frequently, and with impunity, in that corner of Paris, where the Moulin Rouge, the Jardin Mabille, innumerable restaurants and countless gas-lamps flourish today. The gaiety of a certain society has chosen and adopted, in order to expand thereinto, places long haunted by vice, crime and darkness, which have nowadays become the busiest and best illuminated in the capital. There, where brigands once demanded our money or your life with dagger in hand, prostitutes now deploy their seductions—just as dangerous, of course; they rob more dupes in a season than all the thieves in the Allée des Veuves did in twenty years.

  In 1814 and 1815, the elm saw hordes of Cossacks camping under its branches. They hung the produce of their pillage there; their horses, as savage as them, browsed its bark; finally, the hideous children of the Don lit their bivouac fires against its trunk, which burned it in an outrageous fashion and stigmatized it with ineradicable wounds.

  During the Restoration, the elm recovered somewhat. The Restoration had other things to occupy its thoughts than the trees in the Champs-Élysées. It ordered street-lights to be attached to them at intervals, but those street-lights only served, as Dante put it, to render the darkness visible.

  The July Revolution arrived, and that put a permanent end to the repose and health of our elm.

  The new king wanted to embellish Paris, and commenced with the quays and the Champs-Élysées. To the former he gave trees, to the latter, gaslight!

  Gas! It requires subterranean channels and cast-iron conduits that seek out the roots under the ground, mutilating them, crushing them, severing them, tearing them and preventing them from extending. There are leaks that infect them with hydrocarbons and literally poison them. There is a glare the renders it impossible for the poor tree to rest and sleep. The products of that fatal light infect the foliage, cover it with fumes, grill it and deprive it of the nocturnal slumber of which vegetab
les have just as much need as the creatures of the animal kingdom; finally, they pervert the economy of its natural functions and asphyxiate it by preventing it from aspiring and expiring carbon dioxide and oxygen.

  After that came the asphalt sidewalks, which no longer permitted the rain to penetrate the earth and evaporate therefrom; they poisoned the atmosphere with their vapor and fumes. How, in those deadly conditions, could an elm conserve its robust constitution, resist abrupt changes of temperature, supporting alternations of hot and cold in the same day, and suffer the fury of the winds that broke its branches, hollowing out crevices and gutters in the gaping wounds they made, along which bleeding sap ran with the rain?

  Take note that I still have not mentioned illuminations, the most redoubtable of all scourges. Woe betide the roots that the poles required by those illuminations seek out in the depths of the earth! Woe betide the leaves and branches deluged with fume and roasted, for an entire evening, by the fetid exhalations of lanterns. A sticky sweat covered them with a corrosive coating, in which accumulated, additionally, the formidable dust raised up by the tramping of the crowds.

  Thus, our elm and many of its companions were beginning to perish in 1848. They shed their withered foliage before time and strewed the streets with formless and nameless debris. Even the most indifferent pedestrians observed their languor, their pitiful condition and their dry rough, cracked bark, peeling off in various places.

  One spring evening, a little beetle landed on the hero of this story, and slid insidiously between the sinuosities of its bark. Over an extent of at least two and a half leagues, with its the reddish-brown wing-cases and feet, its head ornamented with two long antennae, and its black body bristling with little spikes, it set about ferreting here and there until it encountered a location appropriate to its perfidious designs. It stopped at a part of the bark that formed a sort of microscopic valley, protected on both sides by high protrusions, like hills. In the middle of that valley was a soft, damp substance that had partly decomposed as a result of time, bad weather, and the miseries and sufferings of the tree.

  In that substance, the insect that entomologists call Scolytus multistriatus,64 did not delay, assisting itself with its feet and mandible, to open the entrance to a naturally-formed fissure in the elevated bark. Once it had penetrated between the bark and the living wood, it began to hollow out a tunnel parallel to the cortical fibers in the vertical dimension. It did not work straight ahead but contrived curves and serpentine lines, seemingly capricious but occasioned by insurmountable obstacles opposed by the hardness of certain parts of the wood.

  The scolytus in question was a female. When she had drilled and perforated sufficiently she laid her eggs, covered them with the vegetal debris that her inroads had produced, retraced her steps to her entry-point, paused at the opening, sealed it hermetically with the aid of her body, and died, making sure by that final act of affection of the conservation of her eggs.

  The eggs of the scolytus gave rise to a hundred larvae equipped with robust mandibles, which, scarcely hatched, began to inflict frightful damage, shredding the wood and hollowing out tunnels in all directions. When they were sated to bursting-point, they metamorphosed into pupae and became, a fortnight later, adult scolytes that flew off, mated and returned to lay eggs in their turn.

  That race of diggers multiplied in a fashion so rapid and frightful that, a year later, there was not a single intact tree in the entire Champs-Élysées.

  No invasion ever takes place without bringing in its wake a population of enemies and parasites. Once the scolytes were masters of the trees in the Champs-Élysées, ichneumon flies converged from all directions, which slipped under the bark in order to lay eggs there destined to produced larvae avid for scolytus larvae; then came the millipedes, the woodlice, the ants and the earwigs, all contributing, each according to its strength and habits, to the general work of destruction. So, the bark of the elm, once so beautiful, was seen to blister, to peel and to fall off in large plaques, leaving the moist and delicate tissues of the living wood bare and defenseless.

  Monsieur le Comte de Rambuteau,65 the memory of whom the city of Paris conserves with gratitude, was moved to compassion by so many trees threatened by death. He looked for a physician for them, and ended up finding one. He was, let it be said in passing, a veritable doctor of medicine.

  Under the direction of that physician, the bark that served as a repair of scolytes was attacked mercilessly; millions of insects were destroyed; the gaps were tarred; grooves were cut at the feet of the trees, disposed in rows, designed to allow water and air to reach the rots. The roots of the tree were backed vertically with drainage tubes, the openings of which were covered with broken tiles; bark that was thoroughly diseased was scraped away or removed; finally, the decorticated trees were literally enameled. Today, you can still see them, like invalids in their hospital casts. Furthermore, you will smile at the sight of the upper parts their trunks, circled by a kind of tin-plate funnel simultaneously reminiscent of a teapot and the instrument that Molière did not hesitate to place in the hands of his matassins.66

  Among the most melancholy, the sickest, the most extensively plastered with compresses and the most circled with grooves is the elm whose historiographer we have elected to be. Will it escape death? Will it recover its former vigor and verdure? God alone knows, and the future will inform us. As in all real romances—as Balzac said—its story lacks a denouement.

  In the meantime, a former minister, Monsieur le Comte Jaubert,67 had devoted to these great botanical invalids a charming notice in which he lavishes both science and compassion. That example has emboldened the author of these notes to tell the story of an elm in his turn; and then, as a final excuse, he recalls this legend of his dear and pleasant native land. There was once, on the summit of a rock, an impregnable château where a Baron lived who devastated the entire region for ten leagues around by his exactions, his pillages and his murders. One night, the Baron dreamed that his supreme hour had sounded and that he found himself confronted by God, at the fatal moment when as the church says in its terrible song of Dies irae, the just sense their punishment assured: Cum vix Justus sit securus.

  The angel Raphael was holding a golden balance; Satan was accumulating on the left all the Baron’s mortal sins, represented by the demons that had inspired them. Seven could be counted, who were circling and holding hands around a group of ten others; finally, six were clinging on to the extremity of the beam and trying to force it down on their side.

  The first were saying: “Prideful! Avaricious! Lustful! Envious! Gluttonous! Wrathful! Idler!”

  The second were howling: “Impious! Blasphemer! Church-burner! Bad son! Murderer! Liar! Lecher! Adulterer!”

  The third were screeching, with triumphant laughter: “He fought and pillaged on Sundays! He never set foot in a church! He never went near a confessional! He profaned sacred vessels! Instead of fasting, he gorged himself on meat, even on Good Friday!”

  On the right-hand pan, nothing was visible but one very tiny angel. Alone, he was counterbalancing the weight of the gigantic and hideous horde of the Spirit of Evil.

  “Who, then, are you, gentle protector, who are saving me from the eternity of Hell?” asked the Baron. “Before I descend into purgatory, tell me your name. For, alas, in my sad and culpable life, I do not recall ever having done a single god deed.”

  “On the eve of your death,” the angel replied, “you found a flower in your garden partly desiccated by the ardor of the sun. It lay wilting on the ground; you raised it up with your hands; you braced it with the aid of a stick that you had cut with your dagger; finally to irrigate it, you fetched water in your helmet from a nearby well. That is what has saved you from damnation.”

  The legend adds that the Baron woke up with a start, and that, softened and touched by the immensity of divine mercy, he converted, distributed his wealth to the poor, made his château into a convent, took the cloth and died in an odor of sanctity. He mu
st be stationed in paradise beside Saint Fiacre, the patron saint of gardeners.68

  THE DIABOLICAL COAL-MERCHANT

  On one of the autumn evenings that fog renders so lugubrious in northern France, a farmer already past his prime was passing through a forest that did not enjoy, it must be said, a very edifying reputation in those days.

  Tiot Watremetz—that was the man’s name—was walking, with some difficulty, along paths that were hidden from his gaze by the white and fetid vapors that were increasingly rising from the ground. Sometimes he stubbed his toe on a stone, sometimes he sank knee-deep into earth soaked by the rain; sometimes, even though he was testing the ground in front of him with his staff, he found himself face to face with a tree whose already-leafless branches were tearing at his face, or a thorny bush in which his legs became caught.

  After three full hours of walking through the forest, he ended up getting completely disorientated, and no longer knew whether he ought to go forwards or backwards, steer to the right or turn left—with the result that, his brow bathed with sweat and harassed by fatigue and exasperated, he let a horrible oath escape from his lips that was singularly tinged with blasphemy.

  As the same instant that he committed the sin in question, he heard a little dry cough behind him. He turned round swiftly and found himself face to face with a tall, thin individual dressed entirely in black, save for a red velvet hood that enveloped his face.