Doctor Lerne

by Maurice Renard

  Suddenly, regular hoofbeats sounded on the pavement. In a stable built for thirty horses, Saurien mounted a phantasmal guard, with his ears drooping.

  I wandered through the surrounding woods. They were less dense than I had thought at first. One could move easily through the trees, which were only encumbered by undergrowth in places. The vestiges of a surrounding wall were still evident here and there. When the place began to seem sinister, I went back toward the fields.

  Fortunately, they were seething with activity; on the fresh breeze I heard the ringing of anvils, the singing of laborers and the lowing, beating and whinnying of livestock. The fields were swarming with bright and bustling patches; snuffling pigs were wandering about in voracious packs, grunting; above my head a skylark was twittering, like a melodious Holy Spirit. O Boulevard de Sebastopol, how far away thou wert!

  Meanwhile, Thomas shouted from the château that it was necessary for me to return. We headed for the isolated grange together. Above the door, the word Orangery was still discernible in a crumbling sculpture.

  “Ah, here you are at last!” cried Gambertin. “It can’t be said paleontology attracts you, can it?”

  God in Heaven! That orangery was a museum: a composite of a menagerie, a charnel-house and a nightmare, the memory of which I shall never lose. The hall was lit from the roof. The entire left side, from one end to the other and from the floor to the rafters, was occupied by a gigantic skeleton of implausible appearance. Along the other wall were the less enormous bones of other, equally extravagant, quadrupeds and bipeds. Confronted by that display, I could not help having the bizarre impression of a masquerade; all those skeletons of monsters were like burlesques, especially while standing up.

  Plaques of stone covered the walls, attached there like unorthodox tiles. They were engraved, hollowed out or in relief, with enigmatically-shaped imprints and arborescences. A multitude of irregularly-shaped bones lay everywhere, bleached and labeled with black numbers.

  Gambertin, dressed in a grocer’s smock, was leaning on a workbench strewn with tool—a locksmith’s, it seemed to me.

  I stood there open-mouthed; my curiosity had been awakened. “Give me some explanation of all this,” I said. “This thing here…its dorsal spine could serve as a buttress for the steeple of a cathedral! What is it?”

  Gambertin was jubilant. “That,” he said, triumphantly, “is an atlantosaur.”

  “But it’s…how long is it?”

  “30.22 meters. My forefathers were inspired when they built this vast orangery, and so were the farmers when they emptied it out to transform it into a feed-store!”

  “And that one, with the minuscule head?”

  “A brontosaurus. Beside it, a hypsilophodon.”

  A kind of stupor overwhelmed me. The nomenclature was imposing.

  “Here are two allosauruses and a megalosaur; its neighbor—whose montage isn’t finished, as you can see, since the front feet are missing…”

  “…Is another megalosaur,” I said, dazedly.

  “No,” proclaimed Gambertin, “it’s an iguanodon! If the skulls weren’t perched so high up, you’d observe an important difference between them, and when this one’s forelimbs are in place, you’ll be less easily deceived.”

  “It’s you, then, who have reconstituted these creatures?” I said.

  “The gardener and I, yes. Look.” He pointed at a heap of bones. “In there is an entire compsognathus. I’ll get to work on it as soon as the iguanodon’s finished. If you have the heart…”

  “A compsognathus!” I cried, excitedly. “I certainly do want to help you! What you’ve done here is captivating to the highest degree!”

  “Isn’t it? I knew that you’d come round; it’s irresistible. We’ll experience moments that the gods never knew—you’ll see. With the aid of mathematical reasoning, you’ll reestablish piece by piece, in the bosom of your imagination, the world of the primary era, and you’ll be able to glimpse the solution of the great problem. But you’ve left it too late this morning for me to begin your initiation. Let’s go get something to eat.”

  From that moment on I was prey to an excitement that was to persist until my departure. At the time of writing, having retraced that scene, I still experience the same emotion—the fever of research—albeit considerably attenuated.

  The meal was quickly finished.

  “It’s remarkably warm for the season,” Gambertin observed. “Would you like to take a walk and smoke a pipe? You will, in any case, derive more advantage from my first lesson if I give it to you outdoors.”

  We went out, walking side by side.

  “First of all,” he said, “tell me—are you very religious?”

  “I attend marriage-ceremonies and funeral services.”

  “Good. What’s your political persuasion?”

  “I’m a moderate republican.”

  “But are you…fanatically moderate?”

  “I’m not a militant; I merely vote in elections.”

  “Good, now answer this: what’s your education?”

  “You already know that—I’ve passed the baccalaureate in sciences.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Yes. All that remains to me of those studies is what’s required to recommence them fruitfully—what’s required to understand a demonstration. That advantage hasn’t done my much good, though—commerce is demanding, leaving one little leisure, and the books I’ve read on rainy Sundays were designed for pleasure rather than instruction. Outside my business affairs, I only seek to forget them in salubrious relaxation with a minimum of effort. Working to live has taken away my desire to work. Alone in the world, I have no need to retake my classes in order to direct those of my children and do their homework for them. I’m an old dunce, Gambertin.”

  “So much the better—no preconceived ideas. That’s perfect. You’re not a dunce, Dupont, you’re a tabula rasa…” Enveloping the plain with a gesture, he said: “There was a time when this region was the bed of a primitive ocean, from which the Central Plateau emerged like an island of schist. Then, slowly, the sea retreated, leaving marshes; they dried up, and since then, no radical change has overtaken this plain. The slow deposits of life have simply accumulated there. Turn round. The shore of the ocean—which was then almost worldwide—followed the edge of the present-day woods, not on the side of Les Ormes but at the foot of the mountain…”

  “It’s very bleak,” I said. “It’s reminiscent of the mountains of the Moon.”

  “It was resplendent once, hurling forth dazzling fire—it’s an extinct volcano. It must have erupted during the period when the plain was a marsh. It erupted in the midst of a mass of schist that was already very ancient, its elevation having preserved it from waters posterior to those that had formed it, and from their successive deposits. The eruption elevated the terrain even further and projected a mass of lava from its surface. That eruption re-covered part of the schist—the middle part—and the rest was respected thereafter by geological caprices. Yes, those grey summits are composed of lava. Throughout the region you’ll find them surrounded by schist and not in contact with the bed of the vanished sea—but here, for a short distance, the two terrains are connected. That’s a fairly rare particularity—that intimate association of eruptive rocks with a Jurassic layer.”

  “Presumably,” I said, “that was due of a lava flow?”

  “No—to a collapse of re-solidified blocks during the eruption. I have good reasons for thinking so; those craters, apparently so close, are too distant to have projected their lava as far as the edge of the marsh, and you’ll see that the matter in question arrived there in the form of rocks, not in a molten state.”

  “But what about the animals?”

  “Wait—we’ll get there. You’ll recall—everyone learns it at his mother’s knee—that the Earth’s crust is, in theory, composed of nineteen different layers, not counting their subdivisions.”

  “What do you mean, in theory?” I asked.
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br />   “Yes, because, as you have seen with respect to this schist, the elevations of one era have sometimes set a fraction of the contemporary ground at an altitude that preserved it from burials to come; in other places, by contrast—and this is the case with the Jurassic plain—capricious inundations have suddenly overtaken one country or another. Thus, the entirety of south-western France was immersed while the location of Les Ormes remained dry. I’ll help you get a better grasp of that with my geological maps.

  “So, the crust is stratified in 19 layers, of which each one represents an era—but they don’t all contain fossils, for those which knew no life were unable to enclose any in their bosom. Life only appears, and then very discreetly, in the fourth bed away from the central fire—which is to say, in the second terrain of aquatic origin—the first two beds, of lava and granite, being the offspring not of flood but of fire, and the third of schist, having been deposited by a boiling water incompatible with the exigencies of life. This tells you that you will find no trace of so-called antediluvian animals in these mountains of lava, any more than in their immediate entourage of schist. But here”—Gambertin stamped on the turf and raised his voice—“what a fauna and flora there is!”

  “If I understand correctly,” I said, “the fossils in the orangery are all from the same period?”

  “Exactly. They lived in the middle of the Secondary epoch, the superimposed layers being classified in groups of three into biological epochs: the primordial, the primary, the secondary, etc.”

  Oh, how I wish I could remember that lesson and the following ones! Gambertin acquainted me with multitudes of laws; I listened without taking notes, sure of my memory, so clear and seemingly uncomplicated were his discourses—but what remains to me now? A confused memory from which I laboriously fish up a few scraps—those which seem to me to be indispensable to the understanding of my story.

  He described the history of the Earth, initially detached from the sun in nebulous form then drowned in fire; then solidifying, its ambient vapors falling as rain only to rise up again immediately, then recondense; then, as it cooled, water covering everything…the immersion of the continents, the formidable tides, the earthquakes, and finally, the emergence of life in the bosom of warm seas…its progress from humble and dreary gelatinous substance to humankind, passing through algae, plants, mollusks, fish, saurians, mammals…

  Every evening, some new point was elucidated; with every passing hour, I advanced further into the heart of the mystery. Alas, I understood everything…but I no longer know anything; perhaps it’s forbidden to retain the “because” of the supreme “why.”

  That opening lesson was prolonged.

  As we came back to the château, while the sun was setting with premature ardor, I said to Gambertin: “With all these stirring speculations, we’ve forgotten to visit the excavations.”

  “They’re rather a long way off,” he replied, “on the far side of the forest, exactly where the ancient beach was, at the junction of the lava and the Jurassic terrain. That’s where I bumped into the revelatory bone. Obviously, one might carry out searches over the entire surface of the plan, but fossils are generally infrequent; one could dig a great many holes before finding anything—and then, most of them are fish. A few giant reptiles, like the icthyosaur and the plesiosaur, would, I admit, be great finds—but I prefer to work over there, where there’s a considerable quantity of dinosaurs remains. I find them more charming; you’ll learn the reason later.

  “These animals, whose name means ‘terrible lizards’, were only partly designed for swimming, but, without exception, they frequented the shores of seas and marshes, in which they paddled, some grazing on marine vegetation, others eating fish. Water was still the fertile element, necessary to vital functions, but certain creatures were no longer floating in its continuously, and many unwebbed feet were gladly crowding the firm ground.”

  He opened the orangery door.

  The darkness made the blanched skeletons seem larger.

  I ran a connoisseur’s eye over them, but my pride quickly melted away.

  “How much of the unknown subsists in these presences?” Gambertin said. “There’s the certainty: the bones. But what flesh, what muscles, what organs did they sustain?”

  “You don’t know?” I said

  “No, I can only presume.”

  III.

  My host had said to me: “Since you’re enthusiastic to collaborate with me, I’ll start you off at the logical beginning. Let’s leave the compsognathus to one side. It’s necessary to know, to start with, how one goes about extracting the bones and the imprints. Today, you can help me to fit the iguanodon’s arms, so that we can finish him up—and tomorrow, we’ll go to the cave.”

  So there was a cave. I had not made any comment—and now, in the orangery, mounted on a ladder, we were fixing a monstrous humerus to its iron wedge.

  The gardener appeared. “I don’t need you, Thomas,” said Gambertin. “Monsieur is taking your place.”

  The old servant went out, with a sly smile.

  “That’s my usual assistant—a real brute. He still sees fossils as products of the world’s luxury, useless creations of badly directed forces, somewhat akin to a woman’s work…. Take them for skeletons! Never! He’s not superstitions; one can’t delude him so easily! That Lucifer hides himself in the trees by night, that’s indisputable—but that a bone might be a bone, that’s absurd!”

  Gambertin bolted on the animal’s right forepaw. “Well, Dupont, what do you make of this tiny hand? There’s a thumb that the neighbor doesn’t have, right?”

  Indeed, the two saurians, similar in height and silhouette, were differentiated by the fact that the megalosaur had five equal digits on each forepaw, while the iguanodon’s thumb, spoiling a true hand, terminated in a long pointed phalanx of formidable aspect.

  “What a dagger!”

  “And yet,” said Gambertin, “it lack claws.”

  “That giant must have been the terror of its time?”

  “Make no mistake—the iguanodon, a kind of cow by temperament, didn’t attack its contemporaries at all; it merely defended itself against their assaults. Climb up to the skull; examine its teeth…they’re those of an inoffensive ruminant.”

  “The front ones are missing,” I said, from the ladder’s summit.

  “It’s the beak that’s missing,” Gambertin replied. “The horn isn’t resistant to decomposition.”

  “The beak?”

  “Yes, probably quite similar to an eagle’s beak.”

  With the end of his screwdriver, Gambertin sketched a shape on the wall. “There’s one other difference,” he continued.

  Indeed, the colossus rested on squat talons, a detail not shared with the megalosaurus. The latter possessed four identical paws.

  “One’s an ornithopod, the other a theropod,” my professor explained.

  “You’d swear that, apart from the nose and the extremities of the limbs, they resemble one another like two brothers,” I observed.

  “I grant you the two brothers—but Cain and Abel. Raise yourself up to the other jaw…”

  I went back up the ladder. The megalosaur had the maw of a caiman, bristling with crocodile-teeth. “Oh! That changes everything!”

  “Believe me, megalosaur Cain devoured iguanodon Abel. Perhaps that’s where the myth originated—who knows?”

  It was while exchanging such remarks that we finished mounting the iguanodon.

  The next day was more tiring. At daybreak, our little caravan set off through the woods. We were following a grassy path beneath the nascent foliage. By “we” I mean Gambertin, Thomas, four sturdy peasants, the scraggy Saurien—pulling an enormous cart—and me. Didymus and his compatriots were chatting cryptically. Saurien panted effortfully as he pulled the empty cart, and Gambertin marched without saying a word.

  In that latitude, the heat in 1900 was tropical. At the beginning of the month of April it was already oppressive. We advanced, there
fore, without haste. Left to my reflections, I didn’t draw closer to the sinister mountains without a dull sense of apprehension. It appeared to me that the woods, despite the festival of renewal, were redolent with something indefinable, but definitely ominous. There was, it seemed to me, one element lacking in the celebration of spring. That element, I realized, after careful thought—and I was astonished not to have noticed it immediately—was the twittering and fluttering of birds. What a dismal place a silent forest is!

  I mentioned my surprise to Gambertin. “It’s the same in all volcanic regions,” he replied. “Animals dread seismic convulsions and divine the places in which they’re possible. I’ve observed that law of conservation many times: the countryside around Naples and the isle of Capri are similarly dressed in mourning—but instinct, as you see, persists in fearing perils that are long past.”

  “Tell me, Gambertin—are you are that we aren’t running any danger? Is it because of the kinship that I have to birds that I’m not reassured?”

  He burst out laughing. “One never knows,” he said—and he began to sing a traditional song from the region.

  He was an energetic man, that Gambertin. I’ve always enjoyed the company of a bold fellow, even an authoritative one. He replaced Brown in my intimacy, and I admired him.

  Our path went up a shallow slope and soon opened out into a clearing. A high wall of rocks bordered it, extending into the distance to the right and left, abruptly interrupting the forest, whose poplars brushed its crest with their highest branches. In front of us, on the other side, the rocks continued in abrupt escalades, rising up toward the grey summits that were still retreating into the depths of space.