“This is obtained, I repeat, by a mental concentration of the will toward the conquest of a doubling—which, although it is regarded as chimerical by the profane, is no les confirmed, for certain adepts, with the full degree of certainty that their conviction can embody. With respect to myself, I believe that I have succeeded completely. I no longer confront with myself anything but a separate, nirvanic impersonality, in which my intellect is adapted to the ideal. Once again, I do not exist, relative to my mundane exteriority, and I have taken the necessary steps to send that exteriority to circulate by itself, but selflessly, in the tedium of society. Pardon me, though—in this respect, I forgot to…permit me…”
M. Bonsor brothers stood up very straight, copied instantaneously by the adjacent shadow, and with a formal gesture, said: “Messieurs Brunel and Fauber, I have the honor of introducing you to my Survivor.”
There was an exchange of bows in the lunar obscurity, whose cold gravity augmented the suspicions of the Club that this apparition of the Bonsor brothers, finally simultaneous, might be more or less supernatural.
“All our condolences,” said M. Brunel, necrologically, bowing to the second Bonsor, whom he considered as having fallen from elevated speculations to life itself, condemned henceforth to wander in the flat reality of communal existence.
“And we shall pray for you until the hour of your free resurrection,” added Fauber, in the same funereal tone of commiseration.
The doubled Bonsor then, finally, resumed speaking.
“Suicidophilic in appearance,” he said, “my brother has organized this means of making known the authenticity of his claimed decease. This is the whole of the mystery. He will henceforth retrench himself in the bliss of his dreams and leave me in charge of his daily routines. I shall be subject without release to the brewing of business affairs, visits, soirées, weddings, etc. I shall have to take part in carious administrative councils and parliamentary assemblies. It will be necessary for me to play the wallflower at receptions, affect amusement in false pleasure parties, sketch consternated expressions in the presence of other people’s misfortunes, and, finally, to fulfill the obligations of the human number, with contrived sentences, rigorous politeness, requisite hypocrisies, dinners, indigestions, draughts, rheumatisms and all the rest. It’s infinitely tedious!”
Your annoyance is certainly understandable,” confessed M. Brunel, “and your generously abdicated thought certainly merits a less ambulatory corporeal internment.
“So I thought of devoting myself, for a few days, on my own account, to a mortuary comedy played out in the desired conditions of plausibility—but imagine the difficulties of every sort to which I would be exposing myself. The Church demands confessional and oleaginous demonstrations. The town hall insists on the emission of a last sigh attested by a municipal physician. Add to the exorbitant cost of funeral ceremonies the price of their ill-assorted processions and their dispensation of land, especially when one adds in the illusory clause of concessions in perpetuity. It’s intolerable. There’s no principle of laissez faire et laissez trespasser59 such as the modern mind desires. So here I am, relieved, for the time being, of any obituary whims, and resigned to my tribulations as a social mannequin. Besides, the fault of being able to appear deceased has as its rigorous corollary the semblance of being able to be alive….”
The last gas-lamp expired. The Club members poured out on to the staircase and made their farewells in the main square, while Brunel, Fauber and the double Bonsor disappeared into the shadow spread by the tall façade of the town hall—from which, at that moment, the chimes of midnight emerged.
There were a few moments of further chitchat among the groups.
“What bores and braggarts!” said the card-players, briskly and vengefully.
“What a miscreant that Brunel is!” said a contentedly theistic piquet-player.
“What a clergyman that Fauber is!” declared a Voltairean impériale-player, at hazard.
“Curious, all the same, about that other one who availed himself of death!” mused a whist-player, anxiously.
“That’s all right,” said a resigned bezique-player, “it’s a long time since we’ve had such an amusing evening in Béthune!”
Louis Mullem: The Shadow and His Man
(c. late 1889s-early 1890s)
“Free! Free at last!”
Yes, that really was, it seemed to me, the refrain mumbled by the singular individual next to whom I chanced to find myself on the bench.
We had met a short while before at a funeral, and nothing about either of us had particularly interested the other, each of us being the kind of unostentatious stranger that makes up the numbers of such processions. Now, I could not help sparing him a sideways glance. He was tall and thin, poorly dressed in a black frock-coat—as I was myself—with a tall, unfashionably ceremonious hat like mine. A few linden leaves extended between the morning sun and the two of us poured a trembling green pallor over the fellow—and doubtless over me too.
“Finally free!” he continued to mutter, with slow sighs of relief, like grief extending its wings toward forgetfulness. Was he really speaking? Was it not merely my imagination that pretended to detect meaning in the indistinct breath of his lips?
I analyzed the man in greater detail. He represented a complete insignificance, apparently devoid of any sentiment worth the trouble of mentioning. His fragile and timorous silhouette described a very humble uselessness—and yet, one divined in him a strange mystical satisfaction, conceived of that very excess of non-value: a sort of internal semi-gaiety; perhaps a discreet reaction of irony against the need to fulfill his bleak destiny of being an absolutely nonentity in any social role whatsoever.
Then again, he was scrutinizing with a rather sardonic eye the medley of grass and flowers surmounted by a crucifix—the common grave—before which, bringing a halt to our funerary excursion, we were taking a moment of leisure in the middle of the necropolis.
Was he evoking some deceased person buried in that nameless mud after a purposeless existence? What it that person whom he deemed justly delivered from terrestrial disappointments? Or was he remembering a bad parent, a perfidious mistress, or some false friend or other, of whom death had conveniently rid him?
My curiosity was awakened on that subject. Our recent inhumatory collaboration furnished sufficient pretext for a conversation between people who had nothing to say. I extended a forefinger toward the banal popular tumulus. “Loved or hated, we find them there, don’t we, Monsieur?” I said, with a brusque cordiality, as if to jump smoothly into the supposed depths of his reflections.
He turned his pale face toward me. The features, already clawed by old age, revealed a certain joy, rather disconcerting for me, in embarking upon an ordinary conversation. It appeared to be the satisfaction of a maniac seizing a fortunate opportunity to expound his obsessions. I already feared being drawn into the tedium of an endless discussion in the philosophico-soporific mode customary in the presence of tombs, but his response filled me with surprise.
“Is the person I neither hated nor loved lying there?” he said. “Is he alive or dead? Was, he in fact, ever alive? I don’t know. The materiality of his being imposed upon me an illusion that has effaced the years. That’s all! And I feel that I am free of him…for I was his shadow.”
“His shadow!” I exclaimed, bewildered by the agreement of the word with my interlocutor’s costume and physiognomy. “His shadow?” I repeated. “Oh, that must be a curious story.”
“More harrowing than strange,” he remarked, his voice meditative and his eyelids half-closed on a gaze reaching into the distance of memory. He went on: “I had been going about for 20 years when I first observed the existence of the chimerical creature that resembled me, feature for feature, and which moved in front of me as if my own body were preceding me.
“I was waiting, in that era, for the radiant romance of life, as promised in stories, and I was intoxicated by ideal transports toward any b
eauty floating on my horizon. It was especially at those moments of foolish exaltation, during time spent in the wind and the sunlight of the streets, that the phantom rose up whose double I was.
“I thought at first of simple mirages, for the apparition was limited within the range of my vision. In the distance, it became iridescent and dispersed into fluid; too close, it was suddenly absorbed into me; then, in the fading of dusk and darkness, I no longer saw it. Soon, though, I discerned the true character of the prodigy. It was full of terror. The composite of human light clad in my form acted in my stead and in my place, drawing me inertly in his wake. He went forward in the desire whose dream I caressed, in the resolution of which I formed the will. He gave gestures to my most secret thoughts; boldly or cynically, he incorporated my soul and compelled me, as I have told you, to be no more than the shadow of my own individuality.
“Consider, for example, how things transpired when, in the course of my 20th year, the beauty of a woman advanced toward me, a temptress of infinite hope. Immediately, my damned specter filched a seductive effigy of himself from the reflection of a shop-window, and then confronted the lady’s young splendor with an attitude of infallible conquering audacity; he displayed his foppish fatuity in a greeting; He affected to put one hand on his heart—on mine, alas, which beat as if to burst!—while the other, undulating and romantic, abandoned itself to the blowing of a kiss. Strange success! The beauty, as if dualized by a similar phenomenon, appeared delighted; the brush of the imaginary kiss set a tremor on her lips; a glint of pleasure gleamed between her eyelashes. For a few moments, entirely beside myself, I imagined myself becoming the real hero of the exquisite adventure! But almost as quickly, the fantastic couple dissipated in the evasive play of light, while my own distressed being—oh, how unnoticed!—was subjected to the lady’s haughty indifference!
“Such, my dear Monsieur, was my vain amorous youth; he, my passionate projection, lending himself incessantly to the exuberant pantomime of sensations that I put forth; me, never being anything but his shadow and his silence…”
My comrade paused. He had expressed himself constantly in his dull murmur, which also seemed the echo of a silence and the shadow of voice. Again I was in doubt as to whether he really was speaking, or whether I was merely hearing in my own skull the nebulous story to which the mortuary appearance of my companion gave rise.
“My days, however,” he continued, “had charm then. The unreal actor who was the image of me exerted himself in the impetuosity of the noblest enthusiasms. The disappointment that rebounded therefrom upon the timidity of my soul left me, at least, a certain sweet reverie compounded out of sadness. Ten years later, those gentle impressions were no more.
“That decade had produced no more result than the augmentation of the two or three derisory louis of my monthly wage, in the somber indigence of a lowly judiciary clerk. The poor fellow’s cares, humiliations and rage stirred up a crescendo in my mind—but if I resigned myself, apparently being too much of a coward, if faint attempts at revolt only groaned confusedly in the depths of my consciousness, that was not the case with my prestigious alter ego, who now permitted himself an unleashing of wild insurgency. His face grew green with hate and fury on encountering so many upstarts who paraded in the insolence of fortune and pride. I imagined hearing the bitter cry of the insults he hurled against the costumes of strollers in luxury. He almost contrived to provoke some of the wealthy individuals by virtue of whom his poverty—which is to say, alas, mine, so black it was—seemed muddied with scorn. These affectations procured me the delicious anticipation of a vengeance that would obtain him room for maneuver.
“I confess that I wished that he might commit the spiteful absurdities that he sketched out on my behalf. In the depths of consciousness, I premeditated trepidations on tiptoe, punches breaking noses, the vertiginous trampling of thorns underfoot—but externally, I observed the most prudent impassivity, in order to avoid any reprisals. How superfluous that precaution was, though. By the time the insults reached me, my demon had fled; I was his shadow, in which everything faded away; I became once again the said ruined wretch that no one noticed, and of whose boasts no one deigned to take any notice. Truly, those whimsical effervescences of the street were breaking me, and the following evenings were worse. As I have told you, in the darkness of the garret, the sprite, the gnome, the sylph or the djinn—call him what you like—infused himself within me. We were nothing but an exaltation of rancor, and we were subject to cruel insomnias full of howls against the torments of existence, of which he was only the vain play of light, and which amassed in me an obscure and inexpressible dolor…”
The narrator stopped for a second time, his face grimacing in remembrance of the furies of the past.
“Fits of despair, frightful although futile,” I said, compassionately.
“Certainly!” he continued, having pulled himself together. “There were ten more years of torture, but finally, appeasement had it hour. My goblin was captured by age. He manifested himself outwardly in the most anodyne fashion, and we gradually came into harmony, in the eternal frippery of my black frock-coat, the entirely inoffensive type-specimen of the good little clerk in his den. A conclusive reform! He exhibited from then on a timorous and prudent appearance. He greeted our fellow citizens decorously in their Sunday walks, and even condescended to take off his ceremonious top hat—the one that, unfortunately, I am presently wearing—to salute any ladies and gentlemen that he judged to be important.
“Privately, I protested a little against these platitudinous courtesies. The old revolutionary leaven still fermented from time to time under the whiplash of egalitarian convictions—but I was fated to be the shadow slave; against my wishes, I imitated the polite gestures; I too took off the top hat and dedicated bows to notable individuals at a respectful distance; and by virtue of pure automatism, my coarse impulses were finally transmuted into amiable imitations of urbanity.
“Time completed the dispersal of the vexations themselves. It brought old age with it, and that methodical egotism which dispels emotions for hygienic reasons, if not for philosophical ones. In probably-rational consequence, the dolled-up Lucifer of my own stamp—was that not my own vanity too long contemplative of itself in the reflections of shop-windows?—my Lucifer, I repeat, now ceased to open my wake along the streets. He no longer animated, in the guise of my features, the being devoid of radiation whom he allowed to reach a terminus. Is that enough to make me boast of being free? A fine affair! But I sometimes, all the same, how I miss that aerial twin, by means of whom all that surged within me of bold aspiration, noble desire and judiciary audacity simulated the power of life. I am still a shadow, but the shadow of something that has vanished forever, a patch of shadow on the effaced trace of my soul, dead before me…”
We had risen to our feet toward the end of this prattle, and were going out into the remote quarter overlooked by the hill of the cemetery.
“Your case is very simple,” I told him, by way of conclusion. “In Germany, the tale was once told of the misadventures of a man who had lost his shadow.60 You my fear Monsieur, are a shadow who has lost his man.”
I expected a reply to this subtle explanation, but the person I had been talking to had, I think—I don’t know how—slipped away.
I found myself alone, sharply cutting out on the sunstruck walls the tall, thin outline of an old bailiff’s man in a worn black frock-coat, in a tall ceremonial funeral-hat, and I lost myself among the crowd of passers-by: shadows, like me, of the supreme heroes they once believed they had within them; shadows still of what they wanted to be and could not become.
Louis Mullem: Chemical Eternity
(c. late 1889s-early 1890s)
Doctor Gipson is only known to the public at present by virtue of the launch of a “manifesto” that he has communicated to the newspapers, and which is to serve as a sort of preface or explanatory program to a full-length book that he intends to publish imminently.
&nbs
p; In that preliminary document, however, he posed as the absolute reformer of the medical art and he anticipated the amazing results that the art in question would obtain in future, by virtue of the application of his method. He was, moreover, confident of demonstrating and proving these prodigies in his future volume.
The noise generated in the scientific world by this was immense. Some opined, quite unceremoniously, that our man was a charlatan; other affected a boundless admiration in his regard and confidently fabricated biographies decorated with the most extraordinary therapeutic successes.
By virtue of this concert of anthems and exaltations, in which irony doubtless played an even greater role than certainty, Dr. Gipson emerged, some 15 months ago, as the hero of the day—which ensures, I think, that our readers (it is a reporter from the Go-Ahead61 who is speaking) will obtain some amusement from an intimate sketch of the man. To obtain this pleasure, I made some preliminary inquiries, the result of which was that a one-to-one meeting over a fine dinner was the best means of encouraging the doctor to confidences, and after a rapid exchange of correspondence, I obtained permission to collect him from his domicile one afternoon and take him to my club as a guest.
I carried out this enterprise yesterday, and was received in Dr. Gipson’s vestibule by a lady whose dark costumed augmented the melancholy expression of a face whose handsome features were accentuated by thinness.
“My husband is waiting for you in his laboratory,” she said, having seen my visiting card. “Would you care to follow me?” There was no need for her to reveal her conjugal status; one recognized at first glance one of those spouses with a bruised soul who submit resignedly, in the shadows, to the extravagances and effervescences of a man of genius—or one who believes himself to be a genius.
The Supreme Progress Page 25