The Second Life of Doctor Albin

by Raoul Gineste

  Perhaps, a few months before, the illustrious professor would have clung to those sophisms. Perhaps a paltry but very human cause would have determined him to do so. But today, his beloved daughter was dead, his glory and his power could no longer serve to secure the happiness of his own flesh and blood. Ought he not to sacrifice to the Truth the work that he recognized as false and the reputation unjustly acquired?

  Even though his dolor was of a purely intellectual order, it was even more poignant than the first; and the scientist, wounded in the heart, returning to the past, wondered fearfully whether, as Azaïs7 claimed, the sum of our joys must be compensated by an equal sum of distress.

  The son of a justly esteemed professor, Louis-Jacques Albin, laureate of the general competition at sixteen, intern at nineteen, graduate in physiology at twenty-five, was already almost famous at an age when so many others were still on the benches. Fanatical about science, tenacious in study, although he undermined those qualities by virtue of a crazy avidity to know everything that prevented him from fixing his attention on the same subject for very long, he astonished the scientific world by his prodigious faculty of assimilation. Once, he would have been one of the encyclopedic doctors of the Middle Ages who gloried in knowing everything, and whom the Church hastened to deliver to the pyre.

  Devoured by pride, inclined to ostentation, prompt to anger, but good, generous and trusting to the point of naivety, precious to his allies and faithful to his friends, launched in all societies, placed in favorable circumstances and on a road cleared of obstacles, nothing had been able to stop his triumphant march.

  The skill, and above all the audacity, of his surgical operations had earned him is initial success. At thirty, gripped by a sudden enthusiasm for chemistry, he had let go of his worldly relations, published his Research in the Physical and Chemical Phenomena of Life and justified, by his personal endeavors, the fortune that the curious and his rivals attributed to paternal influence.

  In the same epoch he became the son-in-law of a renowned professor, uniting two powerful parties. Three years later, the famous treatise on Biological Chemistry consecrated his nascent glory in spectacular fashion, and earned him, at the age of thirty-five, a chair in biology specially created for him.

  Since then, the most incredible luck had not abandoned him for an instant. A surgeon in the hospitals, a brilliant clinician whose lectures foreign students flocked to hear, a member of the Institut, a dispenser of positions, a great elector of Academies, the commander of a multitude of medals, a député, even a minister in one of the ephemeral cabinets that are born and die of political intrigue: almost all the favors and titles that human ambition can desire had arrived as if natural and legitimate.

  Was he not the man of an entire people: the peerless scholar, the personality that rival nations envied us, the famous author of Biological Chemistry? Was not the prestigious operator combined with a grandiloquent orator, a writer of clear and muscular style, and a musician that even artistes praised? Never had governmental and popular favor been more justified!

  And all, or almost all, of that surprising fortune derived from a fortunate birth and a false theory that he had developed brilliantly. How could so much power and so much profit have emerged from a hazard, his birth, and an error, his work? It was necessary, for that to have happened, that the influence of the environment in which he had evolved had been singularly unjust and corrupt!

  Outside of his spirit of intrigue and the manual dexterity of an operator, a talent of an inferior order compared with that of an executive or a worker, he had only been the expression of an ensemble; he did not owe his elevation to his own value. And yet that value existed; it was undeniable, a kind of genius; his discovery was the proof of it; why should he not destroy his past work? Was it not an advertisement, and indication of destiny? Ought he to remain the product of official mediocrity? Ought he to wait for the hour of justice to chime, for the contradictors driven into the shadows to take their revenge?

  Yesterday, even today, anyone who had dared to oppose him would have almost have been reckoned a national enemy, but tomorrow? Someone else, perhaps a foreign rival, might be about to discover what he had just discovered, to attack the imposing false god, to bring its down irredeemably into the mud. Was it not better that he should at least have the honor of overturning himself?

  In the first place, the thing seemed logical and easy; but numerous objections soon came to lay siege to his simultaneously proud and virtuous mind.

  His combativeness had made his theories a veritable philosophical and scientific doctrine. A powerful political party had seen them as the confirmation of its anti-religious principles. The confession of his error would be seen, by those prejudiced men, as a shameful retreat, a treason. His most fervent supporters would refuse to follow him and would be in league against him. Then again, would it not be cruel to witness the collapse of his work, to deny the absolute affirmations of the day before, to be the butt of the scorn and mockery of his enemies, to ruin the publishers of the Rational Encyclopedia of which he had been the editorial director, to destroy the influence of numerous disciples or allies who had defended his ideas, to see his lectures deserted and his admirers disillusioned? That someone else might carry out the ingrate task in the name of Truth was one thing, but did he really have the right and the duty to do it himself?

  If he had been able to build immediately, on the ruins of his Biological Chemistry, a new theory that would victoriously replace it, hesitation would not have been permissible; but the principle he had discovered, while destroying his work, was only as yet a point of departure; it would take years to crown the new edifice and acquire—legitimately, this time—an indisputable and more durable renown.

  The eminent professor thus found himself facing a dilemma: either to live in a cowardly compromise, to continue publicly to teach the error while shamefully pursuing the truth in the shadows, at the risk of seeing a fortunate rival do what he did not have the strength to accomplish; or, to destroy himself, without delay, to his own detriment and that of his partisans, the work on which his reputation and power were based. The spirit of truth told him that the latter course was the only one worthy of a true scientist; his sentimentality and everything that attached him to the past persuaded him to keep quiet.

  It was then that, seeking a middle way, his pride, an insatiable wild beast that had just found a prey, caused a madly grandiose idea to germinate in his bold mind, which began by seeming paradoxical and only worthy to serve for amusement, but which then ripened and became imposing, materializing day by day in order to conclude in the most audacious and strangest of projects.

  Dr. Albin, he said to himself, can die without regrets; he has nothing more to expect from this world. He can disappear in full glory, surrounded by all homages and al sympathy. His party, which holds the best political positions, will not reproach him for having caused its ruin.

  Thus, since there are two men in me, let the official man, the hesitant individual linked by friendships, entangled in the past, weakened by self-esteem and sentimentality, disappear; and let the other, the strong man, the just man, the free man, the true scientist, survive, destroy the false work, and proclaim the Truth!

  In brief, I duplicate myself, I witness my own funeral, with all the respect that I owe to my first personality; then, once the doors of the tomb close, I inaugurate a second life, I become the scientific enemy of Dr. Albin, and I annihilate his false glory! I’m forty-six, it’s true, but I’m educated and rich, I won’t have to waste time acquiring a fortune and knowledge; in ten years, I’ll reach the goal.

  What do I have to lose? Nothing. The being that I loved the most is dead; the one for whom affection might reattach me to life doesn’t understand me, and no longer even takes the trouble to hide her love for someone else. I’m weary of honors, I’d be ashamed to teach what I no longer know to be the truth. The intellectual and moral strength that remain within me can be utilized in a new incarnation. Noth
ing more remains for me to do, therefore, except die…in order to be resuscitated!

  What do I have to fear? More ardent struggles, greater obstacles and sharper suffering! But it’s doubtless because I haven’t suffered and struggled enough that the truth has taken so long to appear to me. Dr. Albin was nothing, in reality, but the perfect expression of the aurea mediocritas8 that leads to everything; I shall be able to say: I am the man of genius!

  What mortal has ever had a destiny like mine: two existences of honors, combats and glory?

  I shall make arrangements for posterity to learn, without being able to doubt it, the marvelous adventure. I shall be the man with two faces whose audacity and genius will astonish the world!

  “Unless,” he murmured, “death really does come to interrupt me... Bah! Everything leads me to suppose the contrary.”

  He stood in front of a mirror, as if to observe the still-powerful vigor of his vitality. He was a man of slightly above medium height, with a broad forehead, a dominating gaze, a jutting chin and a pale face framed by abundant black and slightly curly hair.

  “And that’s good for another ten or fifteen years,” he said, thumping his chest. “And as Meng-Tze9 said, ‘It’s never the strength that’s lacking, but the will.’”

  Chapter II

  The scientist, having taken the definitive, unbreakable decision that day to accomplish his fantastic design, reflected at length. It was a matter of dying officially and in an incontestable fashion—which, for a man of his notoriety, was not a banal trick easy of execution.

  First of all, what would be the evaluation of the act from the social viewpoint, and what might be its legal consequences? Was it a fraud in the legal sense of the word? No, since there would be no false declaration on his part, nor any usurpation of entitlement, since civil death would result from it and suicide was not punishable by law. One could, at the most, be considered as accomplice to an error committed by the registrar of births and deaths—which is to say, by Society.

  The lie was, however, indisputable; but that was a deceit of which he would be the sole responsible judge; is not genius, like royalty, above human laws?

  Now, in what fashion ought he to attain his goal? He searched for examples in history but found none. The comedy of the death feigned by Charles Quint had no similarity to his case.10 The imagination of poets and dramaturges did not come to his aid either. The majority of romantic or fanciful inventions did not even have the appearance of reality. He wanted the veracity of his action to be undeniable.

  Two projects appeared to approach his objective most closely.

  One consisted of provoking apparent death by a lethargic drug, and then, having woken up a few hours before the funeral, substituting some other cadaver in his place. The expedient, it is true, would irremediably remove Dr. Albin from the official world, but he judged it dangerous and complicated, and above all, it required and intelligent and reliable accomplice. The absorption of such a philter might, moreover, damage his organism; it would at the very least be indispensable to put himself gradually into a cataleptic state, like the Hindu fanatics who died and were resuscitated at will.

  The other means, of less complete result, had the enormous advantage of dispensing with any confidant. It consisted of departing for some unexplored region at the head of a more-or-less scientific expedition and seizing the first favorable opportunity to disappear. It would infallibly be supposed that he had been massacred by savages or devoured by wild beasts.

  Circumstances decided him to prefer the latter. The Tonkin expedition was taking on the proportions of a major war.11 Field hospitals were being organized in Paris; it would be the very devil if Dr. Albin, an influential member of the Red Cross, could not find a glorious death in that distant land that would crown his first life worthily!

  That idea appealed to his pride, and gained more determinate consistency by the day. Indiscretions, notes and then interviews published in the newspapers of all parties did not take long to announce the news:

  The author of Biological Chemistry, the eminent surgeon Albin, with the patronage and support of the government, is organizing a model field hospital and preparing to join the expeditionary corps.

  Requests flowed from all directions from young and brilliant surgeons of the capital soliciting the honor of following the illustrious example, but the master, under various pretexts, rejected all those who were closely connected with him, and preferred colleagues he scarcely knew.

  During that period of organization, Dr. Albin made arrangements for the future that seemed to him to be indispensable. The possessor of a large personal fortune, he was able to divert a part of it without attracting the slightest suspicion. Five hundred thousand francs appeared to him to be sufficient to ensure his future independence. The immediate purchase of securities risked creating problems later, so he realized that sum in banknotes and deposited them in a financial establishment under the name of Jacques Liban, an anagram of Albin, stipulating that it should be payable on the simple presentation of a justificatory document whose duplicate he left.

  All the preparations having been made, the equipment sent to Marseilles and the surgeons ready to depart—in consequence of an agreement with the authorities, the orderlies would be recruited out there from among convalescent soldiers—Professor Albin wanted to give a farewell lecture before handing his chair over to Dr. Larmezan.

  The vast amphitheater was overflowing with people. Students, scientific and political notables, and even socialites wanted to manifest their sympathies. The professor’s entrance was saluted by an enthusiastic ovation. When the lecture was over, new acclamations burst for from all the benches. The professor signaled that he was about to add a final word.

  “In lavishing me with such marks of esteem,” he said, in an emotional voice, “you render the separation more painful for me; and if the idea that I am about to accomplish a duty to the fatherland did not sustain me, I would feel my courage weakening.”

  Frenetic bravos welcomed that declaration.

  “Death,” he continued, “does not strike all those who risk it, and I hope to have the good fortune to return among you, but if destiny decides otherwise, do not be surprised or afflicted. Let us envisage the end calmly and without too many regrets: to die is to live again, to reenter the mysterious crucible of nature. Our remains are transformed and our spirit survives in our deeds and works. I did not want to leave you, my friends, without saying that to you. Let your deeds be noble and your works be beautiful, in order that that survival will be glorious for you and profitable to humankind.”

  Cries of admiration escaped all throats. For the first time, a remorse invaded the skillful scene-setter. Why was he playing with all those souls? What was the point of that invocation of the Fatherland? Was it not impudent of him to speak of duty, when he intended to desert it?

  But was it not necessary to prepare that brilliant audience for the sensational news that it would not he long delayed in hearing, and was he not still Dr. Albin, the man of official pomposity and social hypocrisy?

  Professor Albin’s field hospital, as soon as it was disembarked at Hai-Phong, was placed at the disposition of Admiral Courbet and recruited its orderlies. The eminent doctor had divided it into two sections. One, established on the bank of the Red River in proximity to the troops then in the region of Son-Hai, was rapidly transported to the combat zone, where it picked up the wounded, gave them first aid, operated in urgent cases and evacuated them as soon as possible to the huts installed at Hanoi, in more hygienic and comfortable conditions.

  Dr. Albin had put himself at the head of the first group, and, without losing sight of his audacious project, accomplished his mission with surprising courage, marching bravely toward rifle and cannon fire, enduring all fatigues and not recoiling before any danger. His colleagues had observed to him more than once that he had come to heal the wounded, and that it was therefore imprudent to take too many risks, but the illustrious scientist, without demanding th
e same devotion from them, paid no heed to their sage advice. He wanted his bravery to be proclaimed, so that his death, when it came, would be considered as the inevitable result of his temerity.

  His desire did not take long to be satisfied, the courage of a celebrated man having few efforts to make in order to be noticed. Dr. Albin was mentioned in dispatches, and the Admiral himself implored him to be more careful of such a precious existence in future. Finding his reputation for boldness sufficiently established, he then judged that he could die with a brilliance worthy of his renown.

  The general staff had warned him that a decisive action was in preparation and that it would be hot. He assembled his colleagues, assigned them posts that disseminated them along the battle line, and stayed with two aides and the orderlies and the hospital’s main base.

  The favorable opportunity was not long in presenting itself. That same day, heavy rifle fire broke out on the banks of the river in the direction of Son-Tay12 and soldiers of the Foreign Legion, unexpectedly attacked by the Black Flags and overwhelmed by force of numbers, had fallen back in haste, abandoning their wounded to the field hospital. The most lightly injured had been able to flee, but the rest... And the officer who told him the story shook his head sadly.

  “Let’s go to their aid,” the surgeon proposed.

  “It would be running to death pointlessly, Doctor. Those bandits, as you know, always finish off wounded and take their heads as trophies. Tomorrow, when our troops have cleared the terrain, you can go to see whether they’ve neglected any, but be prudent—the village isn’t secure.”

  He obtained the most precise indications, and spent long hours meditating. If he found a decapitated soldier of a similar height and age to himself, with a similar skin tone and distinguishing marks on his body, a substitution of identity would certainly be preferable to a pure and simple disappearance, which would always leave a certain lingering doubt...