Doctor Lerne

by Maurice Renard

  In defiance of this speech, I had a new stone carved in the image of the old one, presuming that Gambertin would have given me other advice, and that Brown would have emitted a fourth opinion. I had finally learned to mistrust the influences of the moment.

  That’s all that I’ve gained from the adventure—along with a pince-nez whose lenses are curiously roughened by corrosion…but I’ve avoided finding out what sort of acid produced that result. Would anyone believe me?

  Besides, this incredible adventure has no consoling element: nothing to add conviction to it.

  DOCTOR LERNE, SUBGOD

  To Monsieur H.-G. Wells

  I ask you, Monsieur, to accept the dedication this book.

  Of all the pleasures that its invention has given me, that if dedicating it to you is certainly not the least.

  I have conceived it within a category of ideas that is dear to you. I would have liked it to be more closely akin to yours, if not in literary value—which I could not claim without seeming ridiculous—then at least in that reader-friendliness that all your works possess, which permits intelligences of the most virginal sort as well as less accommodating minds to acquaint themselves with your genius, without which the best minds of our epoch would find its charm attenuated.

  When fortune, good or ill, caused me to happen upon the subject of this novel, in the form of an allegory, I did not think I ought to set it aside on account of a few temerities that its faithful expression would involve, and which an abridged development—a misdemeanor of literary conscience, so to speak—could only sketch out.

  You know by now—you will doubtless have guessed—what I would like people to think about my work, if by chance anyone renders it the unexpected homage of thinking about it. Far from wanting to provoke in the reader’s instinctive self a delight in shocking imagery, it is addressed to the philosophical lover of Truth, in the guise of marvelous fiction, and retains an orderly method within the artificial riot of its narrative twists.

  That, Monsieur, is why I ask you to accept it.

  M.R.

  Preface

  This happened on a certain winter’s evening, more than a year ago. It was after the last dinner party I gave for my friends, in the Avenue Victor Hugo, in a little house that I had rented fully furnished. Nothing apart from my restlessness having motivated the change of residence, they celebrated my farewell as joyfully as they had my house-warming party at the same address. When the time for liqueurs arrived, along with that of whimsical sallies, each of us attempted to show off our brilliance—especially, naturally enough, Gilbert Marlotte, a clubman devoted to dirty jokes, paradoxes and playing the fool, and Cardaillac, our official practical joker.

  I don’t remember exactly how it came about that, after an hour of smoking, someone switched off the electric light and gathered us around a small table in the darkness, insisting on the urgency of doing a little table-turning,. It should be noted that the person in question was not Cardaillac—but Cardaillac might have recruited him as an accomplice, if Cardaillac had a hand in it at all.

  There were exactly eight of us: eight unbelievers sitting at a tiny table whose single pillar split into a tripod and whose round top was burdened by our sixteen hands, joined according to the rituals of occultism. It was Marlotte who informed us as to these rituals. He had once been curious about spirit manifestations and was familiar with gyratory tables, but only as a layman. As he was our usual buffoon, when we saw him take over the organization of the session, everyone lent himself to it with good grace, in expectation of some good fun. Cardaillac was sitting on my right. I heard him strangle a laugh in his throat and cough.

  The table turned, though.

  Then Gilbert asked it questions, and—to Marlotte’s manifest amazement—it replied by means of dry clicks, analogous to those of warping wood, corresponding to the esoteric alphabet.

  Marlotte translated, in a shaky voice.

  Then everyone wanted to question the table, which demonstrated considerable sagacity in its replies. The audience became serious; no one knew what to think any longer. The questions hastened to our lips and the replies to the foot of the table—somewhat in my direction, it seemed, and to my right.

  “Who will be living in this house a year from now?” the person who had proposed the séance asked, in his turn.

  “Oh, if you ask it about the future,” cried Marlotte, “you’ll get nothing but lies, or it’ll shut up completely.”

  “Let it be!” Cardaillac put in.

  Someone repeated: “Who will be living in this house a year from now?”

  The table clicked.

  “No one,” said the interpreter.

  “What about two years?”

  “Nicolas Vermont.”

  Everyone was hearing that name for the first time.

  “What will he be doing at this time, two years from now?”

  “He’s beginning…to write on me…his adventures.”

  “Can you read what he’s writing?”

  “Yes, and also what he will write afterwards.”

  “Tell us…the beginning, just the beginning…”

  “Tired. Alphabet…too long. Provide typewriter, will inspire typist.”

  A murmur went around in the darkness. I got up and went to fetch my typewriter, which was placed on the table.

  “It’s a Watson,” said the table. “Don’t like it. Am French, want French machine. Want a Durand.”

  “A Durand?” said my left-hand neighbor, in a skeptical tone. “Does that brand exist? I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Nor me.”

  “Nor me.”

  We were in distress by virtue of this disappointment when Cardaillac’s voice said, slowly: “I never use anything but a Durand machine. Would you like me to fetch it?”

  “Can you type without looking at it?”

  “I’ll be back in a quarter of an hour,” the other said—and he went out, without answering.

  “If Cardaillac’s mixed up in this,” said one of the guests, “it’s going to be amusing.”

  Meanwhile, the re-illuminated chandelier showed faces sterner than was reasonable. Even Marlotte was pale.

  Cardaillac came back after a very brief lapse of time—astonishingly short, one might say. He sat down at the table in front of his Durand machine. Darkness was restored, and the table unexpectedly declared: “No more need for others. Place your feet on mine. Write.”

  The tapping of fingertips on the keys was heard.

  “That’s extraordinary!” exclaimed the typist-medium. “Extraordinary! My hands are acting of their own accord…”

  “Pfft!” whispered Marlotte. “What a fake!”

  “I swear to you…I swear…” Cardaillac repeated.

  We stayed there for a long time, listening to the noise of the typewriter, punctuated from moment to moment by the bell marking the end of a line and the scrape of the carriage-return. Every five minutes or so, another sheet was delivered to us. We made the decision to retire to the drawing-room and read them aloud as Gilbert, having received them from Cardaillac, handed them to me.

  Page 79 was deciphered in the light of morning. The machine had just stopped. But what it had printed seemed sufficiently captivating to us for to beg Cardaillac to be kind enough to do it again the following evening.

  He did so. And when he had passed many nights sitting at the table at his graphic harpsichord, we possessed the complete adventures of the aforementioned Vermont. The reader will make their acquaintance shortly.

  They are bizarre and scabrous. Their future writer will feel obliged not to commit them to print. He will burn them as soon as they are finished—with the result that, were it not for the obliging table, no one would ever have read them. That is why, convinced of their authenticity, I deem it urgent to publish them in anticipation. For I take them to be veridical, even though they have a far-fetched and caricaturish quality and are somewhat reminiscent of a medical student’s
whimsy, penned in the manner of a comment on the margins of an engraving of a personification of Science.

  Are they apocryphal? Fables have the reputation of being more seductive than truth, and Cardaillac’s will not seem inferior to many others. I would nevertheless prefer Doctor Lerne to be a faithful revelation of actual vicissitudes, because, in that case, since the table has played a prophetic role, the hero’s tribulations have not yet begun, and they will doubtless be unfolding at the same time as the book will divulge them—a strangely intriguing circumstance.

  I shall, of course, know in two years’ time whether Nicolas Vermont is resident in the little house in the Avenue Victor Hugo. Something tells me that he will; how can one believe that a serious and intelligent fellow like Cardaillac would have wasted so much time making up such a crazy story? That is my principal argument in favor of its sincerity. At any rate, if any punctilious reader wishes to enlighten himself, let him go to Grey-l’Abbaye. There, he will be informed as to the existence of Doctor Lerne and his habits. Personally, I don’t have the leisure myself, but I beg that eventual seeker to let me know the truth, being strongly desirous myself of bringing the matter into the light and knowing whether the following story really is one of Cardaillac’s tricks or whether it really was typed by a turning table.14

  I. Nocturne

  The first Sunday in June was drawing to a close. The automobile’s shadow extended in front of me, getting longer with every passing minute.

  Since the morning, people with anxious faces had been watching me go by as if they were watching a scene in a melodrama. With the leather helmet that made my head seem bald, my round-lensed goggles, like the orbits of a skull, and my leather-clad body, I must have looked to them like some infernal and macabre seal, or one of St. Anthony’s demons, fleeing the sun and hastening to meet the night in order to enter the darkness sooner. And, all things considered, I nearly did have the soul of a reprobate, for such is the condition of a solitary voyager who has spent seven consecutive hours in a racing car. His mind takes on a nightmarish character; obsession preys upon him in the guise of thought. Mine was a short imperative sentence: Come alone and give advance notice—which harassed my solitude, wearied by trepidation and speed, like some tenacious hobgoblin.

  The bizarre injunction to Come alone and give advance notice—which my uncle Lerne had underlined twice in his letter—had not struck me as excessively odd at first. Now that I was acting in conformity with it, though, rolling toward the Château de Fonval, alone and without having told anyone, the inexplicable instruction was, so to speak, insistent in displaying its strangeness. My eyes saw its ominous terms everywhere, and my ears sounded them within every noise, in spite of my efforts to chase the obsession away. Would I like to know the name of a village? The indicative plaque announced to me: Come alone. Give advance notice, traced the flight of birds. And the car’s engine, indefatigable and exasperating, repeated thousands of times over: Come alone, come alone, come alone, give advance notice, give advance notice, give advance notice…

  I asked myself why my uncle wanted that, and, being unable to think of any reason, became all the most enthusiastic to arrive, in order to solve the mystery—not so much because I was curious, to tell the truth, about a reply that would doubtless be banal, as because I was annoyed by the excessively despotic question. Fortunately, I was getting close, and the increasingly familiar countryside reminded me so strongly of times past that the haunting began to relax. The populous and busy town of Nanthel slowed me down, but on emerging from its suburbs I finally perceived, as a vague and distant mass, the heights of the Ardennes.

  Dusk is falling. Wanting to reach my destination before dark, I step on the gas. The automobile roars, and the road is swallowed up beneath it vertiginously; it seems to be entering into the car to roll up inside it, as meters of flexible ribbon roll up on a reel. Its speed makes the wind of its progress whistle in my ears; a swarm of mosquitoes pepper my face like particles of lead, and all kinds of tiny creatures splash on my goggles. I have the Sun to my right now. It is on the horizon; the road takes me down, then bears me up again very rapidly, obliging it to set several times in succession and then rise again for me. Eventually, it disappears. I race through the twilight as fast as my brave machine can carry me—and I don’t believe that a 234-XY has ever been overtaken. At that speed, the Ardennes are less than half an hour away. Their mass is already taking on a green tint, the color of forests, and my heart leaps. Fifteen years! It’s 15 years since I last saw them, those dear large woods! My old vacation friends!

  For it is there, in their shadow, that the château hides, at the bottom of its enormous basin. I remember it very clearly, that basin, and can already distinguish the location, marked out by a dark patch. In truth, it’s the most extraordinary ravine! My late aunt Lidivine Lerne, who was besotted with legends, claimed that Satan, furious at some setback, had hollowed it out with a single sweep of his gigantic claw, but that origin is dubious. In any case, the image paints a rather vivid picture of the place: an amphitheater with steep walls, with no other exit than a large defile opening on to the fields. To put it another way, the plain penetrates into the mountain like a terrestrial gulf; it hollows out a cul-de-sac there, whose sheer walls rise up more steely the further it extends, and whose far end is broadly rounded—to such an extent that one arrives at Fonval on the level, without climbing the slightest slope, in spite of its location in the heart of the mountain. Its grounds are the floor of the amphitheater and the cliff serves them as a wall, except on the side of the gorge. The latter is separated from the estate by a wall in which a gate is set. A long avenue extends therefrom, very straight and bordered by linden-trees. In a few minutes I shall be going along it…and shortly afterwards, I shall find out why no one must follow me to Fonval. “Come alone and give advance notice!” Why those instructions?

  Patience. The mass of the Ardennes divides into individual blocks. At the speed I’m traveling, they all seem to be moving. The outcrops slide past one another rapidly, approaching and drawing away, descending only to rise again with wave-like majesty, and the spectacle varies continuously, like that of a titanic sea.

  A bend in the road unmasks a village. I know it well. Once upon a time, in the month of August every year, it was at the village railway station that uncle’s carriage, harnessed to his horse Biribi, waited for my mother and me. We used to go back there in order to return. Hello, hello, Grey-l’Abbaye! Fonval is no more than three kilometers away. I could find it with my eyes shut! And here’s the direct road, which will soon plunge into the woods and acquire the title of avenue.

  It’s nearly dark. A peasant calls out to me—probably insults. I’m used to it. My horn replies to his mournful and menacing complaint.

  The forest! Ah, it’s powerful aroma! The perfume of holidays of yesteryear! Could their memory bring back any other scent than that of the forest? It’s exquisite. I’d love to prolong my nostrils’ feast…

  Decelerating, the automobile moves forward slowly. Its roar becomes a murmur. To the right and left, the walls of the long corridor begin to get higher. If the light was better I’d already be able to see Fonval at the end of the straight avenue. Hang on! What’s the matter?

  I’ve almost crashed; contrary to my expectation, there was a bend in the road.

  I slow down further.

  A little further on, another bend, and then another…

  I stopped.

  The stars were coming out one by one, like luminous dewdrops. The spring night permitted me to see the jutting crests above me, and the direction of their slopes astonished me. I started to back up, and discovered a fork in the road that I had not noticed as I passed it. Having taken the right-hand road, it presented me with a new fork after a few bends, as if it were setting me a riddle. There, I headed in the direction of Fonval, after taking my bearings from the cliffs whose height increased nearer to the château—but a further crossroads nonplussed me. What had happened to the straight avenue
? I was utterly confused.

  I switched on the headlights. By their light, I wandered through a tangle of lanes for some time without being able to figure out where I was, because there were so many intersections and blind alleys. It seemed to me that I had already passed a certain birch-tree. The walls, moreover, still had the same height. I was, therefore, moving through a veritable labyrinth, without getting any further forward. Had the peasant from Grey been trying to warn me? Probably.

  Nevertheless, I pursued my exploration, counting on luck and annoyed by the circumstance. Three times the same junction presented itself within the radiant field of my headlights, and three times I exited from it by different routes, facing the same birch-tree.

  I tried to summon help. Unfortunately, the horn malfunctioned and I had no means of sounding an alarm; as for my voice, the distance that separated me from Grey in one direction and Fonval in the other prevented it from being heard.

  Anxiety took hold of me then. What if I ran out of gas? I drew to a halt at a crossroads and checked the level. My tank was almost empty. What was the point of draining it by going in hopeless circles? After all, it seemed easy enough to reach the château on foot, through the woods. I tried it—but a wire fence hidden in the bushes prevented me from passing through…

  The labyrinth was obviously not a playful enterprise mounted at the entrance to a garden but a defensive contrivance deliberately complicating the approach to a retreat.