He retraced his steps, shivering, and, in order to warm himself up, went into the first establishment he encountered on his route.
It was the Café Américain. Women enticed by his exotic allure immediately came to prowl around him, addressing suggestive twitches of the lips and languorous blinks to him. He gazed at them without seeing them, blinking his own eyes at the display of garish colors, sniffing with an unconscious sensuality the heady odors emanating from skirts and corsages, and drank a hot toddy, which did him good.
He gradually returned to a sentiment of reality. What the devil as he doing in this milieu, so out of tune with his sinister and grave thoughts. He now saw the maneuvers of which he as the object, and was in haste to get away from them—but as he summoned the waiter, a gross Rubenesque blonde draped in mauve velvet, who saw prey ready to escape, came brazenly to ask him whether he was not going to buy her a drink. He shivered involuntarily on recognizing Nini Nichon.
He grasped one last hope. Perhaps he might learn something.
“With pleasure, Mademoiselle,” he said, adopting his circumstantial accent. “And entirely in your honor, I assure you.”
“I can always drink another glass,” sat the fat woman, whose sumptuous costume did not lend her the slightest distinction. “A grog, waiter. It’s so cold tonight that I’d need twenty to warm me up,” she added, laughing heavily. She sat down facing him and waited to be served. He seemed to be studying her intently.
“It seems to me that I know you,” he ended up saying. “Where the devil have I seen you before?”
“Who doesn’t know Nini Nichon? Not four in all Paris,” she proclaimed, tapping her enormous bosom, which began quivering gelatinously. “There aren’t two like me.”
“Oh, I have it,” he said. “I saw you once at the Folies Nouvelles.”
“It’s possible; I once went there every evening. Oh, those were the good times.”
“Weren’t you the friend of a singer—Rose Gontran?”
“The intimate friend,” replied the mass of greasy flesh. “Poor Rose!” she added, drinking her toddy slowly. “She’s dead.” He stared at her; she seemed to be holding back a tear. “She died of smallpox. I closed her eyes myself.”
Chapter XXVIII
In front of the modest table covered with a simple cloth, behind which three examiners were seated without ostentation, the foreign chemist prepared himself to submit to the terrible proofs of the French doctorate.
His companions in the line, timid and trembling, replied with discretion to the questions addressed to them; he had the clear voice and assured tone of a man of worth. A venerable professor interrogated him about the theories of Dr. Albin; carried away by the subject, the American emitted grave doubts about the merit of their point of departure. The examiner stopped him.
“You certainly don’t lack knowledge, Monsieur,” he remarked, severely, “but you’re bringing us theories now for which we haven’t asked, and which are only hypotheses devoid of authority, since no one has demonstrated them. Your affirmations might, perhaps, be affirmed by the scientists of the New World, or find grace among German professors, but they prove to us that you have not understood the beautiful discoveries of our illustrious and regretted master; you will therefore be kind enough to go and study them more deeply, your artistry in throwing dust in the eyes is insufficient for us; we shall hear you again on another occasion.”
He was deferred!
If he had had time to waste the adventure would have amused him: he did not understand what he had invented!
After all, it was his own fault. Why forget that he was presenting himself as a pupil, why perorate like a master? He had not been asked to refute Dr. Albin’s doctrines; he had been asked to explain then, and that is what he should have done.
The lesson was excellent. He easily passed all his other examinations, refraining from emitting the slightest personal notion, repeating all the theories dear to the professors who questioned him, submitted a thesis that was a collection of bibliographical researches and was received with the warmest eulogies.
On the twelfth of March 18**, Doctor Pierre Iblan of the University of Philadelphia donned the French doctoral toga and received the diploma that permitted him henceforth to speak on his own behalf, care for the sick and obtain glory, honor and profit therefrom.
He had thought it would take him five or six months to attain that objective; it had taken him nearly five years! Five years of poverty, persecution and groping, five years of thick darkness that only a single ray of light had traversed.
Fortunately, all of that was about to end…and the devoted friend of those dismal hours was no longer there! That thought alone mitigated the delirious joy that he felt as he emerged from the thesis hall. In the courtyard of the École de Médecine, a gleam of pride illuminated his eyes.
“It’s the two of us, now, Professor Albin!” he exclaimed, raising a menacing fist against the Sacred Arch, while, pensive in his bronze envelope, Bichat seemed to be smiling at him and encouraging him.26
Dr. Iblan, doctor of the University of Philadelphia, doctor and laureate of the Faculté de Paris, comfortably installed in his apartment in the Rue du Faubourg-Honoré, waits for patients, but the patients do not arrive. A few consultants sent by the American Legation who come from time to time to ask his advice, relying on their quality as compatriots, let him know that they are not rich, and end up obtaining treatment for free.
However, the doctor has considerable expenses: a costly rent, a small household. The money he had melts away like snow; the local suppliers, not reassured by the information they do not fail to seek, began to refuse him credit. The rich American and Spanish colonies do not bring the contribution he expected; their patriotism vanishes before the slightest distress, and they prefers to address themselves to the leading lights of French Science. Who has heard of Dr. Iblan, anyway? Where does he come from? Where are his proofs?
I obviously lack connections, he says to himself. It’s necessary to launch myself into society. He therefore sets out in search of invitations, runs around soirées easy of access, perorates in a brilliant fashion in cosmopolitans salons, makes music, attacks all subjects with authority—and achieves unexpected results. All the qualities that once aided in him his upward progress now work against him.
“He’s too good a musician to be a good physician,” snigger some.
“Too much of a physician to be an artiste,” claim the others.
“These people who dabble in everything don’t get to the bottom of anything,” observe the specialists.
“These foreigners can try as they might,” whisper the Parisiennes, “young or old, they never succeed in escaping the flashy category.”
“Haven’t you noticed,” the foreigners confide to one another, “that Dr. Iblan has no character or mark of nationality?”
“He belongs to the neuter gender.”
“A character out of Sardou, then.”
“All dentists, these Americans,” insinuate colleagues aggravated by his brilliant conversation.
“I have a horror of old doctors,” confess the neurotics, ingenuously, “only young and cheerful faces inspire me with confidence.”
These ephemeral connections, he soon thinks, in his consulting room, too often barren, can’t be of any great utility to me; I spend my time in too many places where I only pas through; people don’t have time to appreciate me, or even to get to know me. I need to frequent a salon of repute, and in a sustained fashion. The circle will be more restricted, but I’ll be better able to have myself judged and to create real sympathies.
Here the difficulty becomes greater; one does not penetrate overnight into the intimacy of a house; the more amiable his smiles become and the more engaging his manners, the more the reserve is accentuated.
He finally succeeds in capturing the good graces of the Baronne d’A***, an Austrian lady of note—so it is said—who invites him to her intimate Thursday gatherings.
The
Baronne’s Thursdays are not as intimate as he had imagined. At the very first soirée he has the disagreeable impression of wandering through a carnival masquerade even more grotesque than those through which he has already passed. The drawing rooms are overly luxurious, the furniture excessively gilded; there are too many master paintings, heraldic jewels, family relics and regal snuff-boxes. Old gentlemen whose faces are worryingly pale or excessively acned, like vicious ostlers or debauched sacristans, wear too many sashes, decorations and necklaces of all sorts of orders. Dethroned princes play cards with too much luck. The ladies display too many diamonds and too much bosom, but seem nevertheless too reserved. Demoiselles who are too young and dowagers who are too old have smiles that are too enigmatic and gazes that are too bold. The buffet is too notorious in its insufficiency, and the servants contemplate the appetite of the guests with too much mockery. There are too many foreign generals, plenipotentiary ministers of unknown principalities, ambassadors of distant nations, Italian tenors, Germen harpists, Polish pianists, celebrated cantatrices, famous tragediennes and writers of genius. All those people have too much renown in their own lands for it not to be astonishing that one has never heard of them. The few Parisians astray in that milieu are considering it with too much curiosity. Finally, the Baronne d’A***, a buxom blonde of about forty, whose husband is often away, darts too many significant glances at Dr. Iblan. He is too fearful of the tariff list, and quickly escapes from the excessive intimacy of the place.
It was there, perhaps, that he might have circulated with the greatest ease and perhaps profit, but his scruples are still too keen and his delicacy too sensitive.
A few other attempts at intimate relationships succeed no better. Sometimes it is a milieu of extraordinarily dubious financiers who move millions in words and go home on foot on the pretext of getting a little air. Sometimes it is a cut-throat’s den where the naïve are stripped gaming, sometimes the boudoir of a procuress where the heavy draperies seem to be designed to stifle screams; a mysterious lair where the reek of laxity, treason and crime seem to corrupt the air and creep in the corners. The doors of honest houses remain obstinately closed. It seems that people sense, divine or know that he has no name, no fatherland, no family and no personality.
He then resumes his peregrinations, banal but more honorable, around the fêtes where one merely passes through and receptions remain open, where the people who shake your hand one evening no longer recognize you the next.
Meanwhile, time is flying; his social connections, he observes fearfully, only lead to the subjugation of a few old hysterics that his self-respect sends away, and who then became redoubtable enemies.
His frequentations oblige him to futile expenses, the devil continues to lodge in his purse, and the goal is retreating instead of getting closer.
A victim of his mask, he then surpasses the measure, unconsciously taking on charlatanesque appearances, has recourse to newspaper advertisements affirming with aplomb and arrogance that he has as much and more merit than no matter which of his fashionable colleagues.
Serious people smile, a few desperate individuals rejected by other physicians and reputedly incurable finally come to him and permit him to live in a meager fashion, but the incurables die on his hands and the naïve, enticed by excessive promises, end up proclaiming his impotence; nothing remains of Dr. Iblan but a reputation for employing means of undeniable correctness.
He knows that by raising the tenor of his publicity and employing more money in his advertisement, he would better exploit the credulity of his contemporaries, but the sentiment of his real value inhibits him; the horror of lying, the professional honesty of old, still ties his hands. He only does things that succeeded partially, or not at all.
The need to put himself in evidence then leads to mistakes that awaken all suspicions.
One evening, he finds himself in a salon with well-known politicians, some of whom are former colleagues of député Albin. The majority profess so-called advanced ideas but are only, in reality, narrow minds nourished on bombastic words and imbued with prudhommesque doctrines, shamelessly ambitious, democrats or socialists by order, egotists whose convictions are expended in promises.
They have been taking about the occult sciences, and some are fulminating against mystical tendencies with all the more insistence because a talented young physician, brought into the limelight by recent occultist publications, is affecting to exempt himself from the conversation.
“So-called telepaths, theosophists, mages, diviners, magnetizers and tutti quanti,” declares a rival of Maître Homais, pompously, “are merely skillful charlatans; coincidences and fortune hazards alone establish their reputation; the supernatural doesn’t exist.”
“That’s precisely what the most authorized occultists assert,” declares the young physician, finally picking up the gauntlet. “There is no supernatural; nothing exists outside nature and contrary to it; but it’s nevertheless true that an infinity of redoubtable or beneficial natural forces of which so-called exact science is profoundly ignorant are revealed to initiates. There are properties as strange as magnetism, for example, in many other minerals; the physicists of the Institute have no doubt of it, and Asiatic herdsmen make use of them.
“Without going so far, for thousands of years, the fishermen of our Mediterranean coasts have known, profoundly mysterious as it still is, that a few drops of oil are sufficient to calm an irritated sea; science has scarcely begun to learn that; and how many uneducated peasants of our French provinces know secrets of herbs, enchantments and dreams, while the therapists of the Académie have forgotten that Hippocrates and Galen used them every day. The majority of our remedies—belladonna, digitalis, opium, etc.—come to us from sorcerers who maintained the tradition. What do we not owe to the Medieval alchemists, who were neither madmen nor ignorant?
“Believe me, don’t judge too lightly doctrines that we haven’t studied sufficiently, and let us look at important facts without prejudice! The day isn’t far off when official medicine will perceive once again that, alongside the single force that we recognize today, vitality, there’s another equally important, vitalism. That’s a fact about which there’s nothing supernatural, a fact known throughout the ages, as occultist physicians have proclaimed.”
“There are occultist physicians then?”
“Why not. I know one who has just accomplished a miraculous cure in a desperate case of typhoid fever.”
“The recipe! The recipe!” cry ironic voices.
“It’s quite simple. He transmitted vital fluid to his patient, expelled all thought of death and rendered her the will to live.”
“That physician is a criminal, since, having those powers, he still lets people die every day from that disease.”
“Would you be ready to give your blood every time a patient could be saved by a transfusion? Can’t you understand that, as the transmission of vital fluid is made at the expense of the operator, such a means can only be employed exceptionally.”
“He ought at least to teach it to his colleagues.”
“Some don’t want to, other are unable to receive the words of truth; that’s why there have always been, and always will be, phenomena known to some and unknown to the majority—which is to say, occult sciences.”
“The only sciences that I admit,” announces a humanitarian philosopher, “are those that are displayed in broad daylight, and profit humankind with their discoveries.”
“Humankind,” ripostes the occultist, with a bitter laugh, “a few centuries ago, hastened to burn, without rhyme or reason, anyone who lifted a corner of the veil. We cannot, we who are judges and parties, appreciate the conduct that the humankind of today adopts in their regard; posterity will inform our descendants when it judges our actions and our works, but it is logical to think that if people hide their discoveries, it is because they believe them to be baneful to their contemporaries or harmful, perhaps mortal, for themselves.
“Do you imagine that
the age of persecutions has passed forever? Alas, the hydra that devours the pioneers of ideas has only changed its face and form; an immense myriapod, it enlaces the contemporary world in its viscous rings; there is nothing astonishing in the fact that the initiates are fearful.
“On the other hand, are you certain that all discoveries are profitable to humanity in the way that you mean? So long as alcohol, employed in the form of a cordial, was the secret of a few Alchemists, it was not belied by the name of eau-de-vie invented by Arnaud de Villeneuve.27 Does it not merit the name of eau-de-mort now that science has put it within the range of everyone? And, as a great statesman has said, is it not more harmful to the human race that the three greatest plagues—war, disease and famine—put together?
“Certain discoveries can only be usefully unveiled to beings worthy to receive them. Not all races are equipped to the same degree to digest what you call progress. Entire peoples have died, and are dying, of the civilization that conquest brings them, for under the fallacious name of civilization you almost always conceal vile commercial interests.”
“That’s the theory of the candle-snuffer,” proclaims a radical député. “By what right do you hide from some what you teach to others?”
“Because not everyone merits knowing everything. Because superiority, intelligence and moral value are only acquired by successive efforts, which the law does not decree.”
“If the law doesn’t decree them, it prepares them.”
“It ought to prepare them, but religious hypocrisy and materialistic egotism put a stop to it, and it’s because the occult sciences proclaim the superiority of the spirit and its liberation, that they are persecuted or, which is worse, turned to ridicule.”
The Second Life of Doctor Albin Page 29
