The Second Life of Doctor Albin

by Raoul Gineste

  “Here’s two thousand francs that I’ve been instructed to give you,” the latter said.

  “Two thousand francs!” stammered the delighted stationer. “Oh, dear and illustrious master, you can’t imagine the importance of the service you’ve just rendered me, and I thank you with all my heart—for that sum, I divine, it was you who requested, and perhaps demanded.”

  “Now, permit me to ask you a question,” said the famous operator. “Who are you? Where have I seen you before? I know you, I’m absolutely sure of it, but I can only put the name of a dead man to the physiognomy of which you remind me.”

  “Master, you’re never mistaken in making a diagnosis?”

  “Sometimes I am,” the practitioner assured him, laughing. “All the same, joking aside, who are you?”

  “A simple Belleville stationer, and something of a bone-setter.”

  “That’s not true,” interjected Dr. P***, a trifle dryly. “You’re in hiding, and it’s showing little gratitude for the service that I have, indeed, rendered you to manifest such a great suspicion in my regard. Come on, confess!”

  “If I were in hiding,” the unknown replied, in a grave tone, “and I could tell someone my name, you would be the only person to whom I would wish to confide it.”

  “I understand what you mean to say,” replied his illustrious interlocutor, softening. “Excuse my indiscretion; it’s born of a sentiment of sympathy, and it’s the same sympathy that leads me to give you some good advice before we separate. Since you have some reason for dissimulating your identity, and have chosen the profession of stationer for that, don’t any longer display an instruction and an education out of all proportion to the mask you’ve put on. You’ve awakened Monsieur de S***’s suspicions—let that serve as a lesson for the future. Give me your hand—and I’m certain that it’s not that of an unknown that I’m shaking.”

  They separated.

  “That’s post mortem sympathy,” murmured Charles Balin. “That damned Dr. P*** has true flair—the scientist, a rare thing, is also an artist.”

  While the bone-setter had been serving as a nurse, his enemies had created a stir. The Faculty had taken the matter in hand; it was known that the healer had been an orderly; it was absolutely necessary that an example be made of him, else all the orderlies would set up as bone-setters. An urgent complaint had therefore been lodged and the Prefecture of Police had begun an investigation.

  When the joyful stationer, brandishing his two thousand-franc bills, burst into the modest shop, he found Mariette in tears.

  “Oh, my God! What’s happened? What’s the matter?” he demanded, fearfully. Mariette told him that an agent of the secret police, charged with carrying out an investigation, had come in search of information.

  “Bah!” he declared. “I’m not saying that I don’t care—I’d be lying—but that news is less disagreeable to me, since I have the money that will permit me to take a giant step forward in the realization of my projects.”

  “Yes but I haven’t told you everything,” Mariette replied, her tears not drying up.

  “Explain—you’re torturing me.”

  “The agent of the Sûreté charged with the investigation is Émile, the waiter from the café. He recognized me.”

  “That wretch again,” he growled, carried away by a surge of anger. “Let him go to the devil!” He reflected for a few moments. “After all, the misfortune isn’t as great as you imagine. They’re going to know that Charles Balin and Jacques Liban are one and the same. Well, so what? What can they do to me? Give me a heavier sentence as a recidivist, that’s all. The vagabond Liban has, however, paid society by three months in prison for the crime of having been robbed. It’s true, though, that they’re going to ask me once again who I am and try to hurt me by raking over the mud of your past...”

  “My past?” said Mariette, surprised. “My past has nothing to do with the illegal practice of medicine.”

  “Ha! The court and the prosecution, to establish what they call moral proofs, won’t see it like that. Whatever can cast a slur on an accused won’t be passed over in silence.”

  “That’s infamous! They’d better watch out. I’m not a woman to take things lying down.”

  “Don’t worry; I’ll try to ward off the blow, from which, as regards myself, I don’t have very much to dread. There’s no law to punish anonymity. If the law is intent on discovering my identity, let them try. I defy them to do it.”

  “What if we were to leave, quit the quarter, Paris, France?” Mariette proposed.

  He hesitated momentarily.

  “If I were alone, my dear,” he ended up replying, “that would indeed by the surest and most logical means of avoiding further trouble. I could change my name, take another mask, and that would be the end of it. The bone-setter Balin, convicted in his absence, would escape their indiscreet curiosity. But we’d be obliged to sell the shop, which is your entire fortune, for a derisory price, and I don’t have the right to put you in difficulties. The few savings I possess are absolutely necessary to the imminent realization of my projects. Besides which, that police agent won’t lose sight of us again. I could easily give him the slip, but it wouldn’t be the same for you.”

  He stopped, and set about reflecting profoundly.

  So, whether he liked it or not, Mariette was, and perhaps always would be, an embarrassment, and obstacle!

  The poor young woman sensed it. “What if you left on your own?” she said effortfully.

  He reflected again. “No, Mariette, that would be to leave you the objective of that blackguard’s persecutions; he’d set some trap for you and you’d be caught in it. You still need my help, and I won’t abandon you for the moment. Later—I see, in fact, that I’ll be forced to change my name and identity again—I’ll probably ask you, as an indispensable sacrifice, to accept a temporary separation; but first I want to make certain of your material fate. Let’s await events.”

  They spent a lamentable evening full of evil presentiments.

  Chapter XXIV

  Mariette, disfigured by the smallpox, perpetually absorbed by work, revived by the affection and advice of her friend, seemed to have forgotten the intoxicating triumphs of the stage, but Rose Gontran was not dead within her. Although she avoided going to spectacles, and had forcefully refused the piano that Charles Balin had offered to buy for her, she was still anxious about former rivals and friends, devoured all the theatrical papers and often fell into long periods of sadness that brought tears to her eyes.

  “Rose, Rose,” said her friend—at such times he affected to call her by her pseudonym—“poor Rose! You’re missing the ovations of the public again, weeping for your vanished dream.” She quickly wiped her eyes and tried to laugh.

  “With a chestnut stove like this,” she said, pointing at her face, “no café concert director would consent to give me three francs a night! Père Antoine wouldn’t even want me for nothing.”

  “To be sure,” he replied, “you could no longer, it seems to me, succeed as well in the genre that won you stunning success. It’s necessary, to make the most of the filth that you sang, to have a great self-assurance, a certain charm, grace, beauty, and a crapulous boldness—in brief, an ensemble that it would be difficult for you to have today.

  “If the concert bug has bitten you again, you’d risk vegetating in local cabarets or going to make the delight of sub-prefectures in barns hastily transformed into concert-halls. As for tackling the serious singing stages, that requires long and difficult studies, and there too, the physical plays an important role with regard to the directors and the audience. Perhaps, though, you could go into the real theater and play comedy or drama.”

  “You think so?” she said, falling into the trap.

  “Ah—I see you’re a liar,” he observed immediately. “You can’t get over your regrets; our humble existence weighs upon you.”

  With the most solemn oaths, Mariette swore that she would never set foot on the boards again
—but not a day passed when he did not catch her in the process of asking her mirror whether it was necessary to renounce all hope.

  Another blemish came to afflict her friend and cause him more real chagrin. Although Mariette’s attitude from the viewpoint of fidelity had become irreproachable again, she adored and respected the only man to whom she owed a modicum of honor and joy, had even succeeded in restraining her indomitable love of liberty, and stuck to her daily task without proffering the slightest complaint, she still allowed herself to be drawn to drink, sometimes more than was reasonable. She gladly offered a little glass to the neighbor who came to gossip in her shop, and always had a bottle of rum or cognac hidden behind her bundles of old newspapers.

  Charles Balin perceived the artificial excitement that delivered Mariette to unaccustomed fits of gaiety, anger or loquacity, but, knowing full well that habits of that kind are difficult to uproot, full of indulgence, rightly supposing that she was seeking to forget her disillusionments in drunkenness, he limited himself to amicable remonstrations to which his mistress could not take exception. In any case, ashamed and deploying an uncommon energy, she was genuinely trying to efface that last vestige of her debauchery.

  Every time she had made a reference to the shameful past, he had told her to be quiet; now the reappearance of the baneful waiter, transformed into an agent of the Sûreté, had returned the conversation to the miry epoch in which they had met. That fop, scarred by Mariette, had suffered cruelly in his vanity; he would surely try to avenge himself. Already, when she was at the concert, he had planned a conspiracy that had turned against him; the whistlers had been abused by the audience.

  What would he contrive now that he was in a position to do them harm and a favorable opportunity had unexpectedly presented itself to him? That question always left them sad and perplexed.

  He knew approximately what he was facing: the story of the Café Mansard would be brought up again in court, his unconsciousness on a bench on the boulevard might be related; the matter of simulation would be held against him; but was not she, who had nothing to do with the case, also about to be covered in mud, the whole dung-heap raked over?

  The methods of the law, he repeated to himself, to habituate himself to those execrable maneuvers of chicanery, were not always imprinted with great delicacy. The public prosecutor and the advocate of the physicians’ syndicate would not let the slightest detail escape that might sully him and present him to the judges as an individual denuded of all moral sensibility. Mariette was snarling in a disquieting fashion.

  To put an end to the affair of the Café Mansard, which his enemies would not fail to exploit, he went to that establishment, perceived the manager on the threshold and told him that he had come to settle a bill. The man, unused to events of that sort—he very rarely gave credit—considered him in surprise, without recognizing him.

  He took a louis out of his pocket. “Take the seventeen francs that I consumed in your establishment on the fifth of May 18**, and for which you had me arrested.”

  Increasingly amazed, the manager stammered obsequious apologies. “Come in, Monsieur, please. I’m not the owner and I don’t have the liberty to act as I please; otherwise, believe me, I wouldn’t have had recourse to that extremity. Seventeen and three equals twenty; here, Monsieur, are the three francs, and come again.”

  “You’re forgetting the receipt.”

  “That’s true. Here you are.”

  He hastened to transmit the document to his advocate.

  The investigation was singularly protracted; the examining magistrate summoned him numerous times. His entire past since the fifth of May 18** had been gradually reconstituted; they had even found the traces of his passage through the copyist’s studio, and the latter had not failed to give his liaison with his former employee Raphael a less than honorable significance. He was frightened in spite of himself by the obstinacy with which they were trying to tear the veil that envelope him. Undoubtedly they thought they were on some important trail.

  As he had the first time, he remained stubbornly mute; he could only be convicted of one misdemeanor: the legal practice of medicine. On that subject, he would have been able to invoke the testimony of Dr. P***, and have himself defended by the invalids he had cured, but he did not want, for reasons of scrupulousness, to have recourse to those means. He had dictated the arguments of his defense to his advocate himself.

  Medicine is not only a science, but also, and perhaps primarily, an art. Now, artistry is a gift that diplomas do not deliver. If there are, therefore, outside official science, individuals endowed with the prescience that constitutes a healer, the society that benefits from their services has no right to condemn them, especially when their intervention is signaled by their success.

  That the law, rightly excusing the errors of qualified physicians, should be pitiless toward those who, without any other title, render themselves guilty of negligence or awkwardness, all well and good! But for that law to punish a man who has nothing to his account but indisputable cures—his delicate situation having obliged him to refuse categorically to treat incurable maladies—is inhumane and tyrannical; it is to give an exorbitant and unjust value to a piece of parchment, which, all too often, alas, does not confer knowledge on its possessor. Furthermore, the accused could not be convicted of having demanded real fees; he had always left his clients free in their actions. His prescriptions, even in the opinion of the pharmacists, had been drawn up in a therapeutically impeccable fashion.

  As for the bone-setter’s incognito, he would make use of a perfectly rational hypothesis. Assume, the defender would say to the jurors, that a man has been assumed to be dead, that his wife has remarried, that his children have shared his patrimony; suppose that that voluntary exile, devoured by spleen and gnawed by homesickness, returns to the city of his birth, but does not want to sow trouble and annoyance among his relatives by an official return based on an admission of his identity. Assume that the unknown man had been a skillful qualified physician with multiple diplomas, and ask yourselves whether the accused, whose skill, cures and operations had surprised everyone, might not be that man.

  Such were the broad lines of his defense.

  Fearful that Mariette might be dragged into the case, he judged it appropriate to write to the public prosecutor and his adversaries’ advocate.

  The agent of the Sûreté changed with the investigation, he told them, had a personal grudge against them. Mariette Gantron, it is true, had an unfortunate past, but she had tried to rise above it by all possible means; she was none other than the charming Rose Gontran adored by the public and distanced from the theater by a cruel malady; she now lived with him maritally in the most correct fashion; she had nothing to do with the misdemeanor for which the bone-setter was reproached; it would be profoundly inhumane to recall corruption for which society bore a large part of the responsibility; he appealed to their indulgence, to the broadness of their ideas. Let them be pitiless toward him, if they judged it appropriate, but at least let them have pity on her.

  The day of judgment, so long awaited, finally arrived. Mistrusting the irascible nervousness of his mistress, he ordered her categorically to stay at home, certain that at the slightest offensive word she was capable of resorting to insults.

  In spite of the eloquence of his defender, and the relatively anodyne speech of the public prosecutor, the tribunal, based on a prior conviction , the proven fact of illegal practice and on the incognito that the accused obstinately maintained, sentenced the bone-setter Balin to three months in prison and a hundred franc fine,

  That denouement was relatively satisfactory to him; there had been mention of a registered prostitute whose help had saved his life, but Mariette’s name had not been pronounced. The duration of the reclusion was, it is true, longer than he had expected, but the steps taken by his advocate, combined with the protection that Dr. P*** did not refuse him, obtained him permission to devote himself to his cherished studies.

&nbs
p; He had been put under immediate arrest; one of the Gardes de Paris who escorted him scratched his head with embarrassment had seemed to want to ask him something; he smiled at him to put him at his ease.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” the representative of the public force ended up admitting to him, overcoming his timidity and showing him his ribs. “For a long time I’ve had a pain that sometimes stops me sleeping; the horse remedies that the major gives me are no more use than a plaster on a wooden leg.”

  He could not help laughing. “So you want to submit me to a further conviction, wretch?”

  The worthy soldier was nonplussed.

  “Come on,” he said, “let’s go into a corner. What do you feel?”

  He gave him a consultation, and took out a pocket notebook to write him a prescription.

  Chapter XXV

  Those three months at Saint-Pélagie, consecrated to the most regular and most assiduous work, passed with a rapidity that surprised him. Isolated and temporarily delivered from all care, receiving Mariette’s visit every week, he scarcely thought about cursing his judges. Fundamentally, the law was playing its role, safeguarding the legal exercise of a difficult, delicate and sacred profession; it guaranteed the worthy public against the brazen and dangerous charlatanism of unscrupulous adventurers. Was it not sufficiently exploited by official charlatans? It had just struck him harshly, but what was he? An exception of which blind justice could not take account because his identity was hidden under a cloak of mystery. To what did he owe his worth and his success as a bone-setter? To real medical studies once sanctioned by the demanded qualifications. The law is only a means, it can only be just in the generality and en bloc. Why had he put himself outside the law, outside society? No more than the orderly, the bone-setter could not remain unpunished.

  Now he was about to be able to re-enter into legality; he would go to Liège or Pisa, acquire a diploma there, return to Paris and pas his examinations. For that, a civil estate, documents—papers, as the gendarmes put it—would be absolutely necessary; he would find them in London. He had assured himself once that shady agencies in that city delivered veritable civil estates in return for a few. He would have recourse to that expedient, in general dishonorable, but legitimate and indispensable in this particular case.