The Second Life of Doctor Albin

by Raoul Gineste

  Two months later, aided by a fortunate hazard and the interested protection of the agency, Rose Gontran went to the Ambassadors at four hundred francs a month. There, her debut became something far more serious. Although she had acquired the necessary aplomb and the habitude of the audience, it was necessary to cope with the jealousy of rivals and the appreciation of the petty press. Aided by her friend’s advice, modest, becoming and affable, she was able to maintain herself in a situation that was initially effaced, but became more brilliant by the day. When the dormant rivalries awoke, it was too late. Rose, applauded by the public, judged favorably by the theatrical press, was able to defy the envy of her comrades, the gossip of the wings and the gibes that her poverty attracted to her.

  The intoxication of the stage had taken possession of her ardent nature. She put so much passion and consciousness into singing fashionable platitudes that the most banal lucubrations were entirely transfigured. Soon, authors were bringing her their songs. On that occasion again her friend made observations and suggested retouches, and only allowed her to accept works in conformity with her qualities. Success did not fail to confirm the choices.

  An ambition that he had never imagined devoured her; she felt that it was necessary to take advantage of the favor that the public and the press seemed eager to lavish upon the previous day’s unknown. She wanted to reach the first rank.

  Unfortunately, their resources were blatantly insufficient, and poverty risked being an insurmountable obstacle.

  In that milieu, of such a dubious artistic value, talent, although welcome, is often only an accessory; the beauty of the singers, the luxury of their costumes, and sometimes, the eccentricity of their genre, occupies the place of honor. How many stars of the first magnitude, without their charms and outfits, would become mere embers!

  Charles Balin knew all that; he took account of the sufferings that poor Rose must be enduring. The ordeal must be hard, the offenses to self-esteem incessant and cruel; her rivals had sumptuous dresses and expensive jewels, of which they made the most. She, with the same two or three costumes that they had been only able to procure at the price of the greatest sacrifices, cut a rather paltry figure! Although she dared not complain too loudly, fits of rage followed by long period of sadness, bitter comparisons, eyes reddened by tears, sullen silences, became increasingly frequent and significant.

  The situation would therefore, not take long to unravel of its own accord. He would suffer, perhaps more than he thought, but his task with regard to Mariette seemed to him to be complete. He awaited the painful moment with resignation. He wanted the separation to come from her, or that she would furnish him with a genuinely serious reason. Rose Gontran was still too close to Mariette for the event to be long delayed!

  One day, without the slightest warning, Rose did not come back in the evening.

  In spite of being prepared for it, the method affected him painfully. Why was she doing it is such a brutal fashion? A simple word would have sufficed.

  He did not see her until three days later. Disdaining recourse to lies, she threw herself into his arms, weeping.

  She needed clothes, she was weary of being humiliated by her comrades, the directors were looking askance at her penury. Yesterday, they had made the implication; tomorrow, they might give her the sack. So she had taken advantage of an opportunity, but an opportunity so exceptional that he wouldn’t hold it against her. Who was she? A wretch that he’d taken out of the gutter. A few stains more or less were no big deal, especially if they were made in an intelligent and discreet fashion. Her new estate had terrible demands; he shouldn’t object, then, to the rare blots that she might make in their communal life. He was the only one that she would always love, and it was to him alone that she’d retain an eternal gratitude.

  He stopped her.

  “I don’t hold it against you, Mariette, and I’ve been expecting this dolorous moment, almost with impatience. Fatality has obliged me to leave you; it was necessary, as you know, that it would happen sooner or later, and as soon as possible. You’ve taken the initiative—so much the better! You’ve spared me the great chagrin that the fear of seeing you weep would have given me.

  “You helped me on a day of terrible misery, and in spite of the primordial interest I had in living alone, I thought that I ought to devote a few months of my life to help you to escape from shame. It would be necessary, to redeem you completely, to give you all my soul and all my heart; I can’t do that; that would be to abandon my plans; it would be to commit a cowardice, to transform a meritorious action of my past life into a futile sacrilege.

  “It’s necessary that I return to the mysterious task that is imposed on me, and I render your liberty to you. Let’s separate, Mariette, without bitterness and without regrets, and let’s remain friends, in spite of everything.”

  “The division that you’d like me to accept, I would have been able to forgive you when you were still wretched and you needed my indulgence and my pity; today, when you’re capable of earning a living, I could no longer submit to it without dishonor and without scorn for myself. Now, I have need of all my strength and all my esteem to accomplish the miracle that I have to realize.

  “I don’t know what the future reserves for us, and how we might meet again one day; doubtless it will be in another milieu and under another name; don’t recognize me then unless I recognize you, and don’t seek to retie bonds that so many reasons oblige us to break. But if any danger threatens you, if any despair takes possession of your heart, don’t forget that you’ll always have a sure and disinterested friend in me, who will always make every effort to get you out of difficulty.

  “Let’s embrace one last time, Rose, and not for long, for you’ll make me suffer needlessly.”

  She threw herself into his arms again. He pushed her gently toward the door.

  Leaning on the banister he watched her go down the stairs sadly. A frightful pain gripped his heart; he wanted to call her back, but the cry would not emerge from his throat.

  Oh, if Rose Gontran had only looked up and seen the anguish that had taken his breath away!

  He left the door ajar.

  Mariette might perhaps have come back. Rose Gontran did not.

  Soon, other sentiments came to agitate him. The memory of the work that it was necessary to complete comforted him. Since that absorbing liaison, born of the obligation created by misery and also, he was obliged to recognize, by an impulse of his heart, could only ever be temporary; it was a hundred times better that it end completely. Certainly, he was heartbroken to have lost Mariette, but he ought to deem himself fortunate to have recovered his liberty so easily.

  The clock chimed midday; he resolved to go eat lunch at a restaurant. As he went past the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, his curiosity was solicited by a crowd of idlers who were forming a hedge to either side of the porch.

  A wedding, no doubt, he thought. A long file of carriages, their coachmen and horses decorated with flowers, were waiting at the exit. He drew nearer. The head of the cortege came down the steps of the perron.

  On the arm of Dr. Larmezan, majestically clad in a robe of blue silk, a woman, the bride, looked directly at him.

  He hastened to flee like a guilty man, ashamed, humiliated, his heart bleeding, gripped again by an inexplicable regret at finding himself alone forever.

  Chapter XX

  Convinced that Rose, after having acquired the dresses and jewels indispensable to her success, would not take long to come back to beg his forgiveness; certain that he would be weak enough to allow himself to be recaptured, he resolved, in order to avoid the danger, to leave the sunlit mansard in the Rue Vavin.

  In any case, the narrow abode, which she had filled with her presence, now seemed singularly sad and empty. Before the old piano, still open, on the stand of which the last song that he had had that her still remained, he had even felt tears rising to his eyes. It was necessary, therefore, since it was still haunted by troubling memories, to
abandon that place, where dreams bore him, involuntarily, toward the absentee.

  The Café Concert de l’Étoile had changed management and personnel; Rose would lose track of him and find a lover more in conformity with the demands of her new situation. The aid and advice of the old friend had incontestably been indispensable to Mariette; his presence and his love could only be injurious to the future of Rose Gontran.

  He therefore rented the specious loft of a of town house in the Rue de Ile-Saint-Louis, installed his books and his furniture there, and then, thinking, full of remorse, that since the death of Dr. Albin, the search for quotidian bread and the education of Mariette had prevented him from taking a single step toward the sacred goal, he wanted to redeem his long inaction by means of intense labor, and finally begin the brilliant synthesis of chemistry that had reduced the totality of his past work to nothing.

  The task was much more arduous than he had supposed. He could not repeat, for lack of money, certain fundamental experiments; the official laboratories were closed to him and the miserly libraries only opened their doors to the privileged. In spite of that, he worked day and night for more than two months, sustained by a feverish excitement, scarcely according a few moments to his meals, stealing hours from his sleep, forbidding himself the slightest rest. Carried away by a kind of frenzy, he succeeded thus in laying down the first foundations of the envisioned work—but at the price of what sacrifices!

  The intermittent work he found: music lessons, translations of foreign works, sessions as a pianist, etc., was no longer sufficient to enable him to live in an adequate fashion; the few savings he had had the prudence to put by had been absorbed by Rose’s dresses; his furniture, sold piece by piece, had been reduced to the strictly necessary. It would have been necessary to run hither and yon, interrupting his favored labor, and rather than waste time, which fled so quickly, he preferred to nourish himself wretchedly with meager portions purchased in a vague local creamery and shiver with cold in his large fireless room. Robust as he was, his health could not support so much effort and so many privations with impunity.

  One day in November, on returning from the Bibliothèque Nationale, he went along the glacial Rue de l’Ile-Saint-Louis, exposed to all the winds, inundated with sweat, and felt ill when he got home. He immediately went to bed; violent shivers agitated him all night, and then the symptoms of pneumonia became manifest. He had his old concierge cover him with vesicants and cared for himself as best he could. Scarcely was he convalescent from that first attack, however, than a grave complication set in. A diffuse anthrax of the neck developed rapidly, in disquieting fashion.21

  This time, the malady necessitated the intervention of another; it was necessary to quit the loft where no one had come to sit at his bedside. He covered himself up as best he could, informed the concierge, and, hanging on to the walls, his head hammered by the fever, dragged himself to the somber edifice that might perhaps shelter his death-throes.

  “The central hospitals are full up,” he was told. “We have no more rom. Go to Lariboisière or Beaujon.”

  He demonstrated the impossibility of his taking a single step further, insisted on speaking to the intern on duty, explained his situation to him, protested against the humanity of a refusal whose result would be a certain aggravation of a condition already very grave, and ended up being admitted urgently.

  By an ironic and mysterious will, number twenty of the St-Jean ward entered as a patient in the service that Dr. Albin had directed so magisterially for such a long time. He took refuge, devoured by disease, in the supreme asylum where, full of strength and health, he had so often leaned over the suffering of others. He sheltered, conscious of his own peril, behind the white curtains where he had seen so many poor devils die, with the vague and general pity that results from professional indifference. In the fashion in which an orderly helped him to undress, he already judged their value, the care of mercenaries for whom he no longer had the eye of the mater.

  He spent a night of torment and hauntings. Policemen tracked him from bench to bench and his legs gave way beneath him; abject beings dragged him into an endless whirlwind and his heavy head was suddenly tipped back more forcibly by the gyratory movement. An immense jeering crowd chased him. He was buried alive in a tomb.

  The next day, he was beginning to sleep, taking advantage of the brief morning calm, when the sound of footsteps and voices woke him up with a start. The chief of service, his successor, had just arrived and was making his daily round. A compact group of students was following him, stopping at all the beds, listening religiously to the lessons in anima vili that the master was lavishing upon them, trying to recognize maladies, examining wounds, fractures and tumors by turns.

  “An entrant yesterday evening,” announced the intern, indicating number twenty.

  “What have you observed?” asked the eminent surgeon. “Reply in a low voice in order that these Messieurs don’t hear; we’re each going to judge the case. The intern obeyed. The chief of service advanced toward the patient, ordered him to sit up, hanging on to the rope that hung down before him, and examined him carefully.

  “Look,” he said. “He’s been covered in vesicants.”

  “So, my worthy friend,” said the chief surgeon, “you’ve been ill before coming here?”

  “I’ve just had pneumonia,” the patient replied.

  “And who was the donkey who put those vesicants on you.”

  “It was me.”

  “My compliments—your remedy has put you in the state you’re in now.” He turned toward his audience. “That treatment for pneumonia is a little behind the times, but it still has ferocious partisans, it must he said. My illustrious predecessor Dr. Albin was one of them.” He perceived one of his pupils.

  “Diagnose this illness!”

  The apprentice succeeded the master and palpated the tissues for some time.

  “It’s an anthrax,” he finally replied.

  “Very good; and you, Monsieur Boulon, do you observe the fluctuation?”

  The inexperienced hands of the provincial of that name fell heavily upon Charles Balin’s dolorous neck and attempted to resolve the question by repeated palpations. A third student advanced in his turn to observe the fact. The patient had allowed himself to fall back on his bed, moaning.

  “I can’t take any more,” he murmured. “I’m cold; leave me, I beg you; you can examine me tomorrow.”

  “Let’s leave him,” the chief of service approved. “The poor devil’s tired, and with reason. The case is typical and serious, Messieurs; we’re in the presence of a diffuse anthrax.” He gave a long and brilliant discourse to the audience, who took notes, without thinking that the patient could understand the meaning of the medical terms he employed.

  “I can’t yet pronounce on the outcome,” he added. “How old is the patient? He looked at the placard. “Forty-seven.22 If he’s not an alcoholic, the prognosis might be good, Hey, my man, do you have the habit of taking a few little glasses with friends?”

  The patient shook his head.

  “They always say no,” he observed. “This one doesn’t look like a drunkard. “What métier do you follow?”

  “Writing. You can open up broadly. I’ve never had syphilis and don’t have diabetes,” the patient added, as if to get ahead of the questions he was bound to be asked.

  “Lucky you!” muttered the chief of service. He took his lancet and made broad cuts. The skin split under the steel. The poor devil, clinging to the bed-frame, horribly pale, supported the pain without flinching, but cold sweat beaded his livid face.

  “Come on, my friend, don’t worry; it’s nothing,” he concluded, after having informed his pupils of the contrary.

  “You haven’t noticed,” he said to the intern, as he went on to the next bed, “that if that pen-pusher wore his hair long and shaved off his beard, he’d bear a strong resemblance to Dr. Albin?”

  “Indeed,” replied the student. “I wondered yesterday why I thoug
ht I recognized him.

  Ill as he was, Charles Balin, subject of study, typical case, raw material for observation, no longer had the same way of seeing as Dr. Albin. While still admitting that the hospital ward ought to be a school for aspirants to the doctorate, he judged nevertheless that the situation of the indigent patient demanded a reserve, a delicacy and a respect that he now regretted not always having had.

  The patient spent several days between life and death; perhaps he did not take all the potions that his former colleague ordered for him, and did not always follow his prescriptions, but in spite of that, he found himself out of danger after a week.

  Liberated from the instinctive and egotistical concern that had only made him think at first about his own existence, he examined what was happening around him. He watched, with his patient’s eye, the long agonies that he had only glimpsed with his physician’s eye. The gasps and coughing fits of the dying filled his nights with anxious pity. The hallucinated ramblings of the delirious evoked phantoms that had never appeared to him; the racking coughs and stifled plaints began to augment his own suffering; the insipid and penetrating odor of death gave him nausea.

  He saw a cadaver carried away, enveloped in its shroud, still warm, without any pious hand closing its eyes. Whose turn is it next? the orderlies seemed to be asking as they looked to the right and left.

  There were so many things that he would have sworn he knew thoroughly, of which he had had scarcely glimpsed the appearances. His dolor and misery had taught him to feel pity, and his compassion led to understanding.

  The idea that I was working for the profit of humankind, he confessed, too often made me forget humanity. There’s something other than an anatomical specimen in a cadaver, and something other than a subject of study in sickness!

  His convalescence lasted a fortnight. Soon, he knew, he would be given his ticket of leave. What if he could stay for a while in the hospital, in the capacity of an orderly? That would permit him not to fall back without resources into the street. He needed once again to sell a few poor items of furniture, but it would be better to keep them. He imparted his desire to the chief of service, presenting himself as a former medical student whom reverses of fortune had deflected, and asked for his support.