At the age of 30, he had cut short his Parisian disappointments and settled down in Loudéac within the bonds of matrimony. His fortune, filled out by the contribution of the charming Mademoiselle Claire Blondot, left him abundant leisure to pursue his work in the vein that has just been indicated. Unfortunately, Monsieur Gridaine reported to the magistrate, as soon as he had entered into marriage, he had been forced to defend his freedom to study against obstinate intrusions. Visitors laid siege to his home and passed him through the sieve of an extreme microscopism, which heightened to extremes the anger aroused by the optical exercise accomplished by the “Gridaine gaze” with its aforementioned particular acuity of bourgeois sarcasm. Imagine, in fact, a right eye opening its blue bleakness very wide, while the left eye, clenching its eyelid over the rictus of the cheek, only lets through a vivid spark of irony. By what right did that latter eye carry its insidious question mark everywhere it went? What undercurrents of ennui or disillusionment were being launched via the ingenuous features, very soft and still virginally exotic, of his young wife?
The expulsion of that clan of nuisances could only be obtained after several years of the prudent maneuvers demanded by provincial propriety and concerns regarding prospective heritages—after which Monsieur Gridaine only accorded access to his home to his young cousin César Blondot, an artist with a sensitive soul who, although he surreptitiously surrounded the exquisite Madame Gridaine with a continuous ecstasy, gave great pleasure to the master of the house in compensation, and only affected a very vague awareness of his actual presence.
A favorable era began. They lived, ignored and calm, in a pretty hereditary cottage situated on the very edge of Loudéac, whose grounds, shaded by old trees, bordered open country. The moment seemed to Paulin Gridaine to be appropriate for the resumption of his speculations.
One day, he was leaning on his elbows at the table in the garden in front of a few immaculate sheets of paper, with his forehead in his right hand, armed with a pencil. They had just finished lunch. The ravishing Madame Gridaine, whose features no longer displayed all the enigmatic candor of earlier days, abandoned her nonchalance to the accustomed contemplation of cousin César. The indolence of the hour produced an atmosphere evocative of inspiration. It was charming, and Monsieur Gridaine did not hesitate to inscribe in large capital letters the title of a projected thesis on “The Research of Invisibility”.
Unfortunately, Madame Gridaine, perhaps seeking a diversion from the assiduities of her young cousin, took it into her head to lean on her husband’s shoulder and manifest a semblance of curiosity in the subject of his work. Monsieur Gridaine experienced the natural repulsion of any writer when someone spies in this fashion on the idea at the end of his pen, especially when the idea in question is in no hurry to manifest itself. Abruptly, he scattered torn pieces of paper like snow and swore to avoid in future any attempt to write at home. Fury had brought all his cerebral faculties into play, however, and, as if guided by a sharp need to take his revenge as a thinker, he seized an axiom on the wing, which he judge marvelously valuable for the clarification of his theory and its practical realization.
He had, in fact, concluded that “invisibility can only be determined by means independent of the real.”
This luminous principle stemmed, to tell the truth, from the incident itself. Monsieur Gridaine noted that his recent abstraction had been much better represented by the page that remained blank than by its titular trace, unfortunately glimpsed by Madame Gridaine. A vast perspective of amelioration was opened up by that reasoning with respect to invisibilist methodology. What followed logically, for Monsieur Gridaine, was the task of “immaterializing his actions and gestures” within the scope of human accessibility, and acquiring the gift of “mental non-appearance” within himself as well as externally.
It is easy to imagine the obstinacy of his repeated reflections and experiments, and it was precisely in the course of that laborious period that the idlers of Loudéac exasperated Monsieur Gridaine with a multitude of taunts that were as absurd as they were devoid of respect for the liberty of others. Monsieur Gridaine’s complaints to the prosecutor only became more energetic.
Even if, he insinuated, the legend of “the man who does not want to be seen” were founded on an exact basis, would that give the stupid indigenes the right to treat him as a maniac dangerous to the security of the citizens? He stuck close to walls? My God! That was because he hated to be surprised while transporting himself from one place to another, when, for a sensible man, there is nothing in the world worth the trouble of going anywhere whatsoever, nor in coming back. Furthermore, he only went out to get a little air, something “invisible in essence” and yet without which no vitality could be maintained. If he did not like being “stared at” that was, again, out of reciprocal commiseration for the pitiful ensemble of psychological incoherence and unstable carnal aggregates that constituted the human race. Thus understood, “invisibility” would simply be comparable to that politeness, said to be typical of drawing-rooms, which only admitted people “impersonally” and which, without any allusion to their intrinsic infirmities, excluded from the problem as equal quantities, confounds them all in the false ideal of a single “superhumanity.”
The aim of these mundane strategies, he continued, is to shield “imperfectible” beings temporarily from ephemeral criticism, but only “invisibility” could render such a desideratum effective and durable—and that would be the conquest of true liberty for particular individuals whose mental life could exercise itself without any exterior collaboration. The need “to be seen” is comprehensible among actors, priests, military men, orators, workmen etc., for they are the inseparable instruments of their professions. Save for the categories of workers or apparitors, however, the individual presence is merely a foolish adequation of arbitrary and superfluous superficialities.
Such being the opinion of Monsieur Gridaine regarding our planetary role, one wonders whether he might have acted wisely in having recourse to suicide—a rather simple objection against which his arguments did not lack finesse. His voluntary “non-existence”, he wrote, could only be proven in confrontation with the ambient actuality, in the same way that the intimate conviction of not being ostensible could only be confirmed by receiving from others evidence of “imperception.”
Monsieur Gridaine had no difficulty in recognizing that these truisms were fringed by the naivety of a science in its infancy and that “the plausible hypothesis of a mental evolution outside substance remains one of the most formidable problems of transformism that the future will decide.”
In the meantime, he begged the officer of the court to recall his myrmidons and warn the jokers of Loudéac that the suspicions of buffoonery with which they were harassing Monsieur Gridaine were only founded on the chimeras of their dull stupidity. He proudly claimed the right to maintain his inoffensive appearance as a petty rentier and to continue his studies of “invisibility”—in which, he said, his progress was becoming, at least mentally, increasingly significant.
Among other proofs in this regard, Monsieur Gridaine indicated the sudden progress that he had achieved in the fundamental thesis of his ideas, thanks to a recent circumstance. The incident in question was the performance given by the great actress Anna Bérard while passing through Loudéac.
Expressed entirely, he wrote, by the clamor of her tirades and the fury of her gestures, transubstantiating body and soul in her role, it was the totality of what her body and soul could exteriorize of beauty that the actress delivered to the enthusiasm of the auditorium. And the most ordinary motor of social action—which is to say, the instinct of life reciprocally seen and shown, rose that evening to the level of the supreme syntheses of art.
The excitement of his spectacle modified, from top to bottom, Monsieur Gridaine’s former reasoning. He recognized at a stroke the error that had made him attribute his hopes of isolation to some unknown quintessence of timidity and pride. No! Those two sentiments were
not involved in any causal manner. “Invisibility” and “inaudibility”—of which he would make a special study in due course—now appeared to him as natural attributes of inner being, constituting the indispensable counterpart of the “qualities of expansion and resonance” for which the actress was glorified. In this combination, the philosophical superiority evidently turned in favor of Monsieur Gridaine, for Anna Bérard, “only excited the noise and glare of a human hour that had the appearance of being forgotten” while, by means of “the unexpressed,” our great thinker represented “the eternal secret of the origins and conclusions of our being.”
At the fall of the curtain, he thought that the actress was struck by the mutism and rigid immobility that he opposed to the general effervescence. She seemed wounded by that unusual attitude, and it was as if her acquired power to speak and depict “the ephemeral instantaneity” broke before the brilliant determination assured by Monsieur Gridaine of “retrenching himself in the durable depths of the unknown.”
Indifferent, from that evening on, to the pitiful jests of the Loudéacians, Monsieur Gridaine remained inflexibly of the opinion that “invisibilism is well and truly a positive and progressive science, of which it only remains to determine the usual procedures.”
His gracious spouse supported him at first in this meticulous occupation with a great deal of devotion and subtlety. Yes, at first!—for there soon occurred a number of conjugal incidents correlative of a complexity that Monsieur Gridaine’s subsequent letters to the magistrate only elucidated imperfectly.
By means of the single word “invisibility,” once snatched from the manuscript, Madame Gridaine had penetrated the motive for the exceptional distraction of her husband and had adopted the duty of disciplining his autonomous familiarities. Cousin César still indulged overtly in ecstatic impertinences. The agreeable female, opening hostilities, pretended to lend herself to these exuberant Platonisms and even set out to encourage them, to the extreme limit at which Monsieur Gridaine would depart from the impassivity that he manifested as a spectator.
This tactic, perhaps designed by eternal femininity to provoke a useful and belated explosion of marital jealousy, only produced diametrically opposite consequences. During these gallant interludes, the fortunate Monsieur Gridaine clouded himself in an absorption that won him a notable sum of relative invisibility. But they waited in vain—Monsieur Gridaine’s correspondence with the prosecutor here exhibits the difficulty of explaining such a delicate situation clearly—for the experiment to reach its final conclusion. Cousin César’s ardors were, it is true bordering on paroxysm. Madame Gridaine finally responded to them, it is certain, with an attitude of undeniable tenderness. It cannot be denied that both of them brought the most praiseworthy zeal to repressing their effusions as minimally as possible, leaving the husband to his flattering illusions of “unreal presence.” But with what result? The two young hearts only allowed themselves to hesitate at decisive moments, and Monsieur Gridaine’s ambitions were never crowned by a flagrant vicissitude of nature that signified visible evidence of his impersonality…
War-weary, the two lovers plotted to complete the imbroglio in a distant escapade in private, the unscheduled return from which would depend on the duration of their happiness. Still put at ease by Monsieur Gridaine’s detached manner, the two Cytherean tourists experienced no great anxiety on seeing him, faithful to his method, escort them distractedly to the railway station.
The adventure only procured Monsieur Gridaine the meager satisfaction of an intrinsic invisibilism. Henceforth, he was alone in his deserted home, and the absence of intimate witnesses prevented him from measuring externally his progress in the solution of his great problem. Far from being discouraged, however, he soon impressed on his imagination a prodigious flight of genius—or obsession—following a singular event that his letters to the magistrate recorded succinctly.
For a month, Monsieur Gridane recounted, the Parisian newspapers had been commenting excitedly on the sudden, complete and exceedingly strange disappearance of Mademoiselle Anna Bérard, the incomparable actress. A love story, a womanly caprice, or the weariness of fame, the reporters and diarists speculated, in their banal fashion. Monsieur Gridaine gave no credit to these excessively vulgar interpretations. He knew better, for he recalled the expression of avid curiosity that the actress had turned toward him during her triumph in Loudéac, and did not take long to conclude that he had made her, by virtue of the inherent magnetism of a strong will, into an “invisibilimaniac adept.”
Having embarked on that path, his idealism surpassed the final limits. He waited with total confidence for the “disincarnated spirituality” of Anna Bérard to occupy the space vacated by the prosaic Madame Gridaine; he even succeeded in the inevitable persuasion that the phenomenon was accomplished in the form of “psychic perspiration.” Monsieur Gridaine was exultant. He cohabited in spirit with the superb daughter of the theater and—a notable thing—for the first time in his life, he was in love: the noble love of thinkers, which manifests itself so well outside or beyond its object. The extrasubstantial object of his worship, he wrote, was possibilized between the void and himself, as the conceptual image sensed in advance by a painter must float between the canvas and the model that he is about to reproduce.
Invisibilism was finally affirmed in his pure immateriality, corroborated by the absence of any sensible proof to the contrary. The eminent researcher was already thinking of popularizing his discovery by the acquisition of a patent, when the whimsical Anna Bérard returned to the boards and gathered, thanks to her calculated flight, a fine second crop of popular acclaim.
Hard as the blow was, Monsieur Gridaine did not lay down his arms. On the contrary, he launched himself with even greater intrepidity into his attempts, and cloistered himself in strict isolation, where no one could interfere with his experiments in “invisibilization in itself,” which he claimed, finally, only to be manifest when he was alone, and only to himself. Could he, in any case, avenge himself more worthily on the base perfidy of Madame Gridaine and the intellectual treason of Anna Bérard? Was not the silence in which his laments were stifled the surest power of invisibility for the secret of his soul?
In one last plea to the prosecutor, he insisted, nevertheless, that his freedom of concentration remained permissible, and should be legally defended against the ignorant attacks of the idiots of Loudéac.
The magistrate did not remain insensitive to these entreaties. He went so far as to propose to Monsieur Gridaine that he convert his petty fortune into an annuity, in order to establish his residence in a national and “philosophically sanitary” institution where his remarkable work as an “invisibilator” could continue in total security, under the protection of the State.
Monsieur Gridaine greeted these overtures calmly, but without pleasure. According to him, he only required an act of simple justice in the solicitude accorded by central authority to “the inventor of a new order of scientific ideas.” Governments sometimes thus correct the indifference of crowds to the scientists on whose obscure efforts the future is founded, and governments are doing no more, in such occasional instances, than their duty.
Accepted nevertheless, with a good grace, the transfer was carried out without delay.
Monsieur Paulin Gridaine presently lives beneath the roof of a former monastery, in a pleasant little room that rejoices in the dances of sunlight and shadow activated by the tops of old trees. The simple furniture of that retreat involves no superfluity that might distract Monsieur Gridaine’s meditations from their goal; he does not even run the risk, as he once did, of seeing his calculations of invisibilism given the lie by the inopportune appearance of his image in a mirror.
Walks in the garden also offer him charming hours, although limited according to the hygienic rules imposed by the house. All in all, Monsieur Gridaine’s heart overflows with a grateful satisfaction that he did not hesitate to make manifest in a postscriptum to the prosecutor.
It seems evident to him that official assent has definitively classified “Gridaine Invisibilism” in the certifications of a number of French institutions. The conclusive demonstration of that fact emerges from the conduct observed in his respect by the other people who, by virtue of their genius or their extraordinary talents, have doubtless succeeded in becoming inmates of the same abode by virtue of national gratitude.
My new colleagues, he wrote, these illustrious men with various titles, who would undoubtedly be ridiculed by the wretched people of Loudéac—among whom, I am not unaware, my present refuge passes for a madhouse—do not manifest any symptom of attention at my approach in the garden. Nothing distracts them from the mystery of their thought or extracts them from the preoccupations with philosophy or science that are the essence of their being. They only look at me, as I pass by, with mute, aberrative eyes, devoid of any indication of refraction and animated by a simple muscular mechanism of unconscious vision. In their vicinity, I am quite imperceptible. Nothing! They no longer see me, any more than they see the void, and they continue their progress toward their dreams of infinity without suspecting that “the Invisible” has just passed before them.
Louis Mullem: Club Conversation
(c. late 1889s-early 1890s)
The shadows were already gathering in the main hall of the Art and Industry Club. Two of the gas-lamps distributed around that pleasant location had, in fact, just been extinguished, in view of the fact 10 p.m. was about to strike, and that was the time when night is thought to begin in our placid and orderly little town of Béthune.
The Supreme Progress Page 22