“That wouldn’t happen if people didn’t make a métier out of astonishing their fellows and chasing after money with pretended secrets: exploiters on one side, imbeciles on the other. The love of the marvelous that simple minds have is fundamentally nothing but an aspiration toward the better, toward the best; it’s inadmissible that they’re cheated.”
“Is it any more admissible that they’re exploited, deceived and harmed by scientific hypotheses, yesterday’s verities, tomorrow’s errors? Your science is impotent and wretched, the means of which it disposes are so limited, its views so narrow and its pretentions so great, that its intervention is more often harmful than helpful. Wasn’t it in the name of science, only to cite one example, that for centuries, physicians extorted and killed their patient by bleeding them left, right and center? Diaforus isn’t dead yet. So combat cupidity and charlatanism wherever it seeks to insinuate itself, but don’t declare a priori that all the honest people, all the scholars are on one side and all the rogues and ignoramuses on the other.”
“You’re not going to go so far as to admit the deceptions of spiritism, mythological fables and popular superstition?”
“Words—all that’s just words. I’m not saying that; I’m simply affirming that alongside known phenomena, there are occult phenomena that a few privileged individuals know and the revelation of which would astonish you prodigiously.”
“I’d certainly like to be astonished,” voices proclaim from various directions.
The young defender of occultism falls silent—but Dr. Iblan cannot resist the need to intervene
“That’s very easy,” he affirms. “I don’t approve of all my young friend’s theories and I’m not a mage or a diviner, but if it’s merely a matter of astonishing you, I’ll take responsibility for that.”
The challenge is accepted.
He leans close to the ear of one and reveals a family secret; he reminds another of a parliamentary intrigue to which only a few individuals had the key; a third is amazed to find that confidential steps taken in a distant epoch are known to the American doctor; a député is astonished to learn the cause that had motivated his vote in a important circumstance; a former minister hears a state secret recalled.
Everyone looks sat one another, astounded. A glacial silence succeeds the animated conversations. The pseudo-sorcerer is almost made to understand that his presence is a cause of embarrassment and annoyance.
He leaves a few minutes later, under some pretext, perceiving too late that he has just committed an absurd blunder. Anxious people interrogate him with their gaze; no one can understand. He is a spy, a secret policeman, a dangerous individual, perhaps a master blackmailer.
No one dares say so aloud but everyone is thinking it.
Chapter XXIX
The American doctor owes several months rent, his suppliers refuse him any credit; stamped papers are beginning to rain down. The rare patients that arrive scarcely serve to prevent him from dying of hunger.
I’ve taken a false path, he thinks, by attempting to gather an aristocratic clientele at a stroke. I’ll go to a quarter more in rapport with my…I don’t say Bohemian situation, but at any rate exceptional. It’s in the real Paris, the Paris of artistes and men of letters that I ought to demand the means of existence; they’ll understand me, they don’t have stupid prejudices; they won’t ask where I come from or who I am; they’ll be content to judge me on my work.
Seduced by that idea, which he thinks excellent, he hastens to rent an apartment in the Rue des Martyrs, and set out in search of connections. But there, although approaches are easy and camaraderies of the brasserie are established overnight, although his originality and his universal knowledge win him the admiration of painters and the consideration of singers, although the gentleman cabaretier of the Chat Noir takes him under his wing, competitors are innumerable and the clients have long since adopted the detestable habit of paying their doctor with the dedications of books or gifts of sketches. Between artists, one only exchanges favors, and Dr. Iblan is the artistic physician par excellence; the philistines do not want to hear mention of him under any pretext.
Within a month he perceives that he has taken another false route and is just about to go pitch his tent elsewhere, when a news item delays his determination. A fin-de-siècle dancer has just been shot with a revolver at the exit from the Moulin Rouge.
Dr. Iblan, a regular at a nearby café, hastens to the scene and finds himself in the presence of the great Annette. The bullet has penetrated her arm. He extracts it without further ado and has the injured woman, who has not recognized him, taken to her domicile.
Amicable relations are quickly established between the American surgeon and the grateful convalescent.
Annette is living in a richly furnished apartment; much-decorated old gentlemen, spirited reporters and even renowned artistes come every day to obtain news of her. She is in the full bloom of her beauty and, seeing her every day, white and pink in floods of lace in which languid charms flourish, Dr. Iblan senses appetites reborn that are all the more imperious for being exasperated by memory. But the beautiful Annette, who, without knowing it, is avenging the disdain of the former pianist, encloses herself in an indifference denuded of all artifice.
Certainly, she does not refuse to accord him a few hasty favors; that is how, she admits cynically, she always pays her physicians, but it is professionally and not otherwise. It is in vain that the foreigner attempts to reanimate the heart that was once so warm. In vain that his agile fingers run across the keyboard, to revive the enthusiastic gallops, the pointed polkas, the deafening variations and suggestive tremolos of yore, in vain that he exclaims many times, always hoping to put her on the right track: “It’s extraordinary how much you resemble someone I once loved!”
The reciprocal question, the response he awaits, never arrives.
He provokes confidences, excites her to tell her story in order to recognize the trace that Monsieur Charles might have left in her heart, but the facts bear so little resemblance to those he knows, there are so many forgotten items and lacunae, that he cannot help smiling. It is a biography reviewed and corrected for the usage of serious clients. Neither his name nor those of others are pronounced; the attempted café concert debuts have become enthusiastic triumphs, Père Antoine’s establishment an elegant confectionery frequented by the high life of the entire world and the rapacious coal merchant a generous impresario who covered her with gold.
“Why not continue such a brilliant career?” he asks, a trifle sarcastically.
“Singing fatigued me too much; it’s not written in stone, though, that I won’t return to it.”
“Didn’t a fashionable singer make her debut at the concert whose name you cited” he asked.
“You’re doubtless talking about Rose Gontran.”
“That’s the one. Did you know her?”
“Very well; we had the same teacher of piano and singing—an old eccentric, in parentheses.”
“What was his name?”
“Monsieur Charles.”
“Monsieur Charles who? Monsieur Charles what?”
“Oh, you’re asking too much; I never bothered to enquire as to whether he had another name. He gave me lessons; I gave him his fee, and then bonjour, bonsoir.”
“And what became of Rose Gontran?”
“Probably what becomes of artistes after having lost their beauty or their voice—a singer in some provincial hole, star of a garrison, prima donna in some South American republic, unless she’s a seamstress, concierge, domestic or street-sweeper, how do I know?”
“Or dead,” murmurs the foreign doctor, sadly. After a long pause he adds: “And how did you get the idea of becoming a dancer.”
“I had that in my blood,” the forgetful individual affirms.
Decidedly the beautiful Annette does not want to see or hear. In the midst of the confusion of lies that she tells him every day, he succeeds, aided by local café gossip, in reconstituting her ve
ritably history.
As he had suggested to her during the short liaison that followed their encounter at the Folies Nouvelles, she had resolved to charm her contemporaries with the elegance and flexibility of her figure. Instead of addressing herself to some high priest of Terpsichore, she had transposed her neurosis into the dangerous world of dubious dancers. Freed from her mania for pianists, but continuing nevertheless to consider amour as the supreme and sole initiator of all the arts, she had run around the fashionable dance-halls and swooned before the celebrities of the splits. There, however, things had progressed differently than at the concert.
Instead of deceptive virtuosos devoid of great energy, who toyed with her and were amused by her, she found uncommonly demanding individuals of bad character. The majority of master gigolos put a tariff on their rude and savage embraces, not being content with a brief infatuation, and put an excessive self-respect into not being dismissed.
The great Annette, direly put to contribution by her first essay, robbed of several jewels during the second, had the misfortune to want to attempt a third. She stole the “Gomme Elastique” of Madeleine de Commercy, an acrobat with gilded hair, like the delicacies whose name she bore.
As the capricious Annette put that price on it, the Vestris28 of the Barrière agreed to accord her his favors and unveil the secrets of his unparalleled elasticity to her, but when, after a few days, carried away by her old habits of inconstancy, she took it into her head to cast envious eyes at the quadrille in which “Moulin à Vent” caused his flippers to spin, Gomme Elastique declared categorically showing her the extremity of his vulgar arms, that he would take charge of ensuring her fidelity in true affection. She could have as many clients as she wished, but so far as dancers were concerned, he alone would give her lessons henceforth. For the first offence, he would content himself with a little beating when she returned. It was not him who had come in search of her, was it? She had only to let him alone and he would not have left Madeleine, a woman of such good earning-power.
Tamed, the tall blonde finally devoted herself to study.
She had once tried to learn music and singing by means of intimate acrobatics; she learned the art of fluttering in public by means of punches and kicks.
“Look,” her lover said to her, during the first lesson in dislocating arms and legs, “that’s how it’s done; it’s no more difficult than that; it’s necessary to lift yourself, that’s the main thing.”
The tried to imitated the master’s acrobatics, and could not succeed.
“It’s necessary to lift yourself, I tell you!” cried the lout full of rage. “Here, look at me, it’s not a footbath to swallow. I’m lifting myself.” The tall devil opened his legs horizontal, fell to the floor and rebounded briskly. Poor Annette tried to do likewise, but her legs obstinately formed and angle; she could not get up again, and the professor invariably came to her aid with a few kicks, delivered in accordance with the rules of the art.
“That’s how I was taught the métier,” affirmed the former acrobat, to console her.
After a few days, the lout, not sensing any serious vocation for instruction, threw his patience to the winds.
“All this is wasted time,” he declared. To learn to dance, it’s necessary to dance in front of people. That being the case, you’re going to dance with me at the Moulin tonight.”
The great Annette, put on the spot, made her debut immediately, and—who would have believed it?—in the midst of epileptic quadrilles and gross leg-movements, the elegant gaucherie and gracious inexperience of the pretty woman, attributed to a perverse refinement, won her an unexpected success. The lubricious old men and the “passionate” younger ones formed a circle around her; artistes seduced by hr beauty proclaimed that Annette’s dancing was “the latest thing,” and that renown, in search of which she had so often offered herself in sacrifice, suddenly arrived at the moment when, disenchanted by her guide’s boots, she had promised herself to give up.
Her name, like Rose Gontran’s at one time, was displayed in large letters on colored posters. The newspapers praised her grace, and she was imitated in end-of-the-year revues. The great Annette, alias “Crépuscule des Dieux,” was the delight of the Elysée Montmartre, the glory of the Moulin Rouge and the ornament of the Jardin de Paris; noble foreigners outbid one another for her in the night restaurants.
Unfortunately, Gomme Elastique, believing himself to be the unique artisan of that vogue, made increasingly exacting demands; she was obliged to address herself to the Prefecture of Police in order to break the chain, and that was why the furious pimp had attempted to murder her.
“And now,” says Annette, who has given him the final details herself, “not only is the dirty swine in prison, and I’m rid of him for a long time, but the revolver shot has given me wonderful publicity. I’ve been offered an engagement at the Folies Hippique; a Serbian or Rumanian prince—I don’t know which, exactly—has offered me a left-handed marriage with a town house, a carriage, livery and all that...and if you were very kind,” she continued, simpering, “you’d come to see me a little less often. I’m cured now, and your assiduity might compromise the success of the affair—unless you’d like to maintain me on the same footing?”
Offended by that appeal for discretion, Dr. Iblan bows ceremoniously, and shakes the dust from his shoes.
Chapter XXX
By what aberration of his sense and his mind has he wasted his time and his money in a crush worthy at the most of a schoolboy? A reversion to childhood? That senile caprice has devoured his last resources. He sells his overly luxurious furniture, settles a few accounts with his creditors and goes to establish himself in the Faubourg-du-Temple. It is in that populous quarter, in the midst of humble working people, that he ought to have come to begin with; those who are suffering know better how to ease the misfortune of others. He has, moreover, succeeded admirably in Bellevue as a bone-setter; his former clients would soon come to see him now that he could care for them overtly—but for that it would at least be necessary that the American doctor take off his mask, and it is impossible for him to do that.
So, there, no more than in the other, more fortunate quarters, luck does not consent to smile on him. The sick, it is true, are far more numerous, but the work is far harder; the stairs to go up and down all day leave him out of breath and exhausted by fatigue. The spirited thoroughbred of yore can scarcely resign himself to that toil of a coach-horse. If he could even obtain a just profit from it! But the majority of the clients to whom he presents his bill look at him peevishly and declare that they would rather pay the baker than the doctor. Others seize the slightest pretexts, claiming that they have been poorly treated, and heap him with insults; a few regretfully bring out a little money set aside and separate themselves from it with a heavy heart. No one understands that a doctor might have an immediate need to receive his honoraria; the same ones who claim to be exploited by the upper class and struggle righteously in the defense of their interests, do not admit that a physician has a right to eat.
Every day reserved a cruel disappointment for him, a further discouragement. One of his former admirers declares to him, furiously, that a Belleville bone-setter once cared for him in a much better fashion—that one, at least, didn’t try to drag out sicknesses, as physicians do, to empty the pockets of their patients.
There, however, better than in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, the physician succeeds in paying his most urgent debts and making a living—but at the price of what incessant efforts, what a murderous struggle!
Dr. Albin can rest in peace; the pitiless need to live has taken possession of his enemy more than ever, absorbing his days, troubling his nights, devouring his physical vigor, stifling his cerebral faculties and rendering him almost impotent.
He knows sleepless nights spent at the bedside of pauperesses with puerperal fevers in fireless rooms where the rags exhale the stink of misery. He has leapt up to answer the imperious ringing of the bell that summons him fro
m his first sleep. He had climbed the calvary of flights of stairs, has stopped, out of breath, at doors standing ajar, where surly faces tell him that he has arrived too late and they have gone to find someone else. The pharmacists have deemed that his prescriptions do not bring in enough and the relatives of the sick that they cost too dear. He has been sent away for having said that he judged a case desperate—what is the point of keeping a doctor who declares himself impotent?—and others have reproached him for having dissimulate the gravity of the illness and allowing the client to die intestate. He knows mute reproaches before the dead and the hateful gazes of potential heirs before a cure.
In brief, he has learned to his expense the heavy responsibility of the poor local physician—a crushing burden, of which Dr. Albin, and even the bone-setter Charles Balin, givers of consultations at home, never felt the weight.
He thinks then, fearfully, that if Charles Balin, caught in the gears, had not taken long to be crushed by the social machine, Dr. Iblan, armed with the guarantees demanded by law, has nevertheless been thrown as fodder to the prejudices of a crowd in which collective injustice is accentuated by individual stupidity and ignorance.
That observation fills him with bitterness; an invincible disgust invades him gradually; he wonders whether it is really useful to suffer for the truth and if everything is not for the best in the worst of all possible worlds.
He no longer has the ardor that sustains, the faith that saves, the youth accessible to humanitarian dreams. The need to live squeezes in its claws the indulgence and natural generosity of his heart; poverty stifles his generous sentiments; he is snatching bread from mouths hungrier than his own, and that harsh necessity, which tortures and humiliates him, drives him to tears.
Again, if Mariette were there, he would find, on coming home in the evening, exhausted by fatigue, a smiling face and a few consolatory words, but he is alone, terribly alone. No hand reaches out toward him, no sympathy envelops him, no joy welcomes him.
The Second Life of Doctor Albin Page 30
