Doctor Lerne

by Maurice Renard

But I could not extend that intimate reverie indefinitely, on a busy road, with a cadaver. I therefore took hold of him, reluctantly, and seated him on the left. The straps from the luggage-rack attached him firmly to the bodywork. Once his gloves were back on and is face was hidden beneath his readjusted headgear, his goggles and his scarf, he seemed to be asleep. We departed, side by side.

  No one in Grey noticed my neighbor’s stiffness, and I was able to take him back quietly to Fonval, full of admiration for the dead scientist and pity for the amorous old man who had suffered so much. I forgot the offences in confrontation with the offender’s death. He no longer inspired anything in me but an immense respect and—need it be said?—an insurmountable repugnance, which made me draw away from him as far as possible within my seat.

  Since our encounter in the middle of the labyrinth on the morning of my arrival, I had not spoken a word to the Germans. I went to look for them in the laboratory, having left the automobile and its sepulchral chauffeur in front of the main door, in the charge of the housekeeper.

  The assistants understood immediately from my gesticulations that something extraordinary had occurred, and followed me. They had the worried expressions of guilty men who foresee disaster I the slightest event. When they were certain of the misfortune that had struck them, the three accomplices did not hide their disappointment or their anxiety. They held a vociferous conference. Johann exerted his authority; the other two became obsequious. I awaited their pleasure.

  Finally, they helped me to carry the professor up to his room and lay him down on his bed. Emma saw us, screamed and fled; the Germans left with no further ado. Barbe and I remained alone with my uncle. The fat housekeeper shed a few tears—in honor I suppose, of death envisaged as an entity, rather than to satisfy her master’s guardian spirits. She considered him from the heights of her corpulence. Lerne had changed; his nose was pinched and his fingernails were blue.

  “We have to lay out the body,” I said, suddenly.

  “Let me do that,” Barbe replied. “It’s not a pleasant task, but I know how to do it.”

  I turned my back on the mortuary dressing. Barbe had the knowledge of old peasant women, who are all part-time midwives and undertakers. She soon announced: “It’s done, and done properly. Nothing’s lacking, apart from holy water and the decorations I don’t have…”

  Lerne was so white on his entirely white bed that they seemed to me to blend together and take on the appearance of an alabaster sarcophagus with its commemorative effigy, hewn from the same block of marble. My uncle, with his hair carefully combed, wore a dress shirt with a white cravat. His hands, so very pale, were joined, with a rosary passed through his fingers. A crucifix formed a shiny breastplate. His feet and knees stuck out of the sheets, like very distant pointed snowy peaks. On the nightstand, behind the bowl devoid of holy water, in which a superfluous sprinkler lay in vain, like a dry twig, two candles were burning. Barbe had made the item of furniture into a kind of altar—and I reproached her sharply for that inconsequence. She retorted that it was customary—and with that, closed the shutters. Shadows were hollowed out on the dead man’s face, anticipating the future and creating a premature marbling effect.

  “Open the window very wide!” I said. “Let the daylight in, the birdsong and the scent of the garden.”

  The servant obeyed me, even though it was “contrary to custom”, and then, when she had received my instructions for the obligatory formalities, she left, as I asked her to.

  A powerful aroma of dead leaves was coming from the grounds. That odor is infinitely sad; one breathes it as if one were listening to a funereal hymn. Crows were flying past, croaking as they do in edifices, and their passage imitated an enormous and prodigious flight from a basilica. The approach of dusk was darkening the daylight.

  I inspected the room, in order to look at something other than the bed. Above the writing-desk there was a pastel drawing of my Aunt Lidivine, smiling. It is a mistake to make portraits smile; they are doomed to so many heart-rending sights—so the colored Lividine, having smiled while seeing her spouse fornicate with a whore, was smiling still in confrontation with his deplorable remains. The picture was 20 years old, but the powder of pastels, which resembles the dust of the ages, gave it an appearance more ancient still. Every day, moreover, darkened it further and seemed to age it more. It therefore removed my aunt and my youth into an even more distant past. I didn’t like it. I tried to interest myself in other objects: in the falling dusk, the first bats, the baubles in the room, the candles that—regrettably—lit it feebly, the dancing gleams….

  A wind that was rising was able to hold my attention momentarily; it sent an invisible torrent roaring through the foliage; to hear it in the hearth, moaning as it clove the darkness, one might have thought that one was hearing the passage of time. With one more forceful gust, it extinguished a candle; the other flickered. I slammed the window shut; staying there without light was not an attractive prospect.

  Suddenly, I became sincere, and no longer sought to dupe myself; I needed to look at the dead man, to survey his impotence. I lit the lamp then, and placed Lerne in a flood of light.

  He really was handsome. Very handsome. Nothing was left of the sullen physiognomy that I had found after fifteen years of absence—nothing…save perhaps an errant irony about the mouth, the shadow of a sardonic smile. Did my late uncle still have some afterthought? Dead, the man who had retouched the Great Work still seemed to be defying Nature…

  And his work appeared to my mind, with all its sublime audacity and criminal boldness, which were as worthy of the pillory as a pedestal, the birch-rod and the palm at the same time. Once, I had known him worth of the latter and would have sworn that he would never deserve the latter! But what mortal adventure had made him become, for nearly five years, a châtelain who murdered his guests?

  I asked myself that. Meanwhile, the phantoms of Klotz and MacBell seemed to be screaming under their torture from the depths of the windswept hearth. The squall, having turned into a tempest, was whistling through the cracks in the doors; the candle-flames were restless; a curtain swelled out and fell back again with a discouraged gesture. Lerne’s white wispy hair flew about, parted by the storm-wind, which drew it back for a long time, brushing it in every direction…

  And as the imponderable hand of the squall played among the tresses, I stood leaning over the bed, frozen in astonishment on seeing the continual appearance, beneath the silvery wisps, of the violet scar that circled Lerne’s head from one temple to the other!

  A frightful demi-crown, the indication of the Circean operation! It had been carried out on my uncle. By whom?

  Otto Klotz, of course!

  The mystery was clarified. Its final veil, a shroud, had been snatched away. Everything was explained! Everything: the professor’s abrupt metamorphosis, coinciding with the disappearance of his principal assistant, with MacBell’s journey, and the effective eclipse of Lerne! Everything: the hostile letters, the altered handwriting, the failure to recognize me, the German accent, the losses of memory and, in addition, Klotz’s reckless character, his temerity, his passion for Emma, his reprehensible endeavors, the crimes perpetrated upon MacBell and myself. Everything! Everything! Everything!

  Recalling my beloved’s story to mind, I was able to reconstitute the history of an unimaginable crime.

  Four years before my return to Fonval, Lerne and Otto Klotz come back from Nanthel, where they have spent the day. Lerne is probably joyful. He is going to resume his fertile studies on grafting, whose aim—whose sole aim—is the benefit of humankind. But Klotz, in love with Emma, wants to give this research another, profane objective, motivated, above all, by money: the transplantation of brains. Without a doubt, he has proposed that objective—which he could not pursue at Mannheim for lack of money—to my uncle, without result.

  The assistant has his own Machiavellian plan, though. With the help of his three compatriots, altered in advance and hide in the bushes, he kno
cks the professor down and ties him up. He locks the man whose wealth and independence—identity, to put it another way—he covets in the laboratory.

  He wants to take advantage of the physical vigor that he is going to surrender one last time, however, and he spends the night with Emma.

  The next day, before dawn, he goes to the laboratory, where Lerne awaits him, hidden from view. His three trusted accomplices put them both to sleep, and graft Klotz’s brain into my uncle’s skull. As for Lerne’s brain, they content themselves with stuffing it behind the forehead of Klotz, who is no more than a cadaver, and they hastily bury the lot with the anatomical debris.

  So there is Otto Klotz, behind the mask, reclad in the desired appearance, costumed as Lerne, master of Fonval, Emma, the work: a sort of hermit-crab sheltered by the shell of the creature he has killed.

  Emma sees him emerge the laboratory. He comes back into the château, pale and doddery, overturns the routines of everyday life, and has the intersecting paths of labyrinth constructed. Then, certain of his impunity he begins his terrible experiments in his unapproachable lair.

  Futile experiments, fortunately! The body-snatcher had expired too soon, without having reaped the fruits of a larceny of which he was the victim, since the heart disease that had just carried Klotz away was actually the property of Lerne’s body. The thief of a house is punished thus when the roof collapses upon him.

  I understood now why that face had resumed my uncle’s true physiognomy! The German’s soul was no longer behind it to give it his own expression.

  Klotz was Lerne’s murderer, rather than Lerne having murdered Klotz! I couldn’t get over it. That was one confidence the double individual had omitted to make to me! Vexed at having been his dupe for such a long time, I told myself that, had I been living alone with him, I would probably have perceived the deception, but that the society of people as gullible as Emma and accomplices like the assistants had drawn me into the delusion, in the wake of their own error or pretence.

  Oh, Aunt Lidivine, I thought, you’re right to smile with your pastel lips. Your Frédéric fell into an odious trap nearly five years ago, and the spirit that has just quit this body is not his. Nothing foreign remains within it now, save for an empty brain, a carnal mass as banal as the liver. It’s really your excellent husband that we’re watching over, while the other has just died and is paying his debt….

  On that thought, I sobbed my heart out beside the astonishing corpse—but the sardonic rictus left behind as the wicked soul fled, like a stamp, still hindered my self-expression. I effaced it with the tip of my finger, modeling the hardened, scarcely malleable mouth to my own taste.

  As I drew back to consider the effect, someone scratched softly on the door.

  “It’s me, Nicolas…Emma.”

  The innocent girl! Should I tell her the truth? How would she react to such a twist of fate? I knew her. Scorned so many times, she would have reproached me for trying to trick her. I kept quiet.

  “Go to bed,” she said, in a whisper. “Barbe will take your place.”

  “No thanks. No, leave me alone.”

  I had to continue my vigil at my uncle’s side. I had accused him of too many sins, and I needed to ask forgiveness of his memory, and that of my aunt. That’s why, in spite of the bacchanal of the storm, we talked all night long: the dead man, the pastel, and me.

  When Barbe came at daybreak, I went out into the cold of the morning, which soothes the fever of vigils on the skin.

  The autumnal grounds exhaled a faint cemetery odor. The great wind of the previous night had plucked all the leaves, and my footsteps crackled on their thick couch; there were none to be seen any longer on the skeletal trees, save for a few here and there, and it was difficult to tell whether they were leaves or sparrows. In a matter of hours, the grounds had made their preparations for winter. What would become of the marvelous greenhouse, as the frosts drew near? Perhaps I would be able to get into it, by virtue of the death that had dispossessed the Germans.

  I veered in that direction—but what I saw at a distance caused me to accelerate my steps. The greenhouse door was open, and an acrid sooty smoke was coming from it, as well as from holes in the glass.

  I went in.

  The rotunda, the aquarium and the third hall were a scene of destruction. Everything there had been overturned, smashed and set alight. Heaps of rubbish were piled up in the idle of each of the three halls; all mixed up there, I saw broken plants with shattered pots, shards of crystal and sea anemones, soiled flowers next to slaughtered beasts—in brief, three massive compost-heaps in which the tripartite exhibition-hall saw the end of all its marvels, delightful, poignant and repulsive alike. Rags were still burning in one corner; in another, on a heap of ashes, a few branches—the most compromising—were completing their consumption in hissing embers. Charred bones stank to high heaven.

  The assistants had obviously devoted themselves to this pillage in order to obliterate every last trace of their work, and only the storm had prevented me from hearing them—but they would not have stopped there, in such determined progress…

  To make sure, I visited the charnel-house under the cliff. There was nothing there, in a gaping hole, but various animal bones and carcasses, the former without skulls and the latter without heads. Klotz was no longer there. Nelly wasn’t there either.

  The sack of the laboratory seemed to me to be a masterpiece. It demonstrated the innate aptitude for such work of men in general and certain nations in particular. I had the run of the buildings, all the doors of which were clicking and banging at the whim of the wind. In the courtyard, nothing remained but living animals that had not been subjected to treatment; I only discovered the others later. Here, therefore, there were no signs of destruction. The operating theaters, by contrast, enclosed an indescribable chaos of broken bottles, whose mingled liquids inundated the floor-tiles with a pharmaceutical lake. The massacre of books, labels and notebooks was dispersed throughout the holocaust of twisted apparatus. Finally, the majority of the surgical instruments had been stolen.

  The scoundrels had made off with the secret of the Circean operation and the equipment necessary to carry it out. Their lodgings, in fact, with their empty cupboards and chests of drawers, and their furniture turned upside down, informed me that the three conspirators had gone for good.

  As I left the ravaged living quarters, my attention was caught by a thread of blue smoke rising up behind the building’s left wing. It was coming from a heap of semi-charred detritus, the cadaverous odor of which made me nauseous. I approached it nevertheless and, one of the items of detritus having moved, pulled it out of the pestilential pile. It was a miserable rat, lame and scorched—which, having gone mad, leapt at me. Its head, trepanned in the round, laid bare the bloody brain.

  Seized by horror and pity, I finished the last of the monsters’ victims off with the heel of my boot.

  XV. The New Beast

  Under the influence of an apathy entirely understandable in the circumstances, the official physician did not carry out any examination or checks. I told him about my late uncle’s fainting fits, and my uncle’s diagnosis of his own heart disease—and he gave me permission to have him buried.

  “Doctor Lerne is certainly dead,” he said “And our present task will, with your permission, stop at that ascertainment. As for the rest, it’s not for us to undertake causal investigations that might lead us to contradict such an eminent master and make him die in some fashion other than the one he anticipated.”

  The funeral took place in Grey-l’Abbaye, with no pomp and no audience—after which I spent ten days clarifying the affairs of that inconceivable duplicity, the unparalleled amalgam of murderer and victim, Klotz-Lerne.

  In the course of his phenomenal existence—about four and a half years—he had not made a will. That proved to me that, in spite of his funereal prognostications, death had come upon him entirely unexpectedly, for, in the opposite case, he would doubtless have taken the
trouble to disinherit me. At the back of a secret drawer in the writing-desk, I found my uncle’s will, as the letter of long ago had told me I would. It left everything to me—but Klotz-Lerne had overladen the estate with mortgages, and contracted many debts.

  My initial impulse was to appeal to the law, but the absurdity of the case struck me, and all the upsets that such a substitution of identities might import into the juridical order: the crimes of a sort unforeseen by the Code, the fraudulent sales, the usurpation of a heritage that was unnatural as well as illegal. It was necessary to resign myself to all the consequences of a mind-numbing fraud, and not breathe a word, for fear of worse insinuations.

  Taking everything into account however, accepting the succession still left me in profit and I had already decided to rid myself of Fonval, by sale at auction, foreseeing that it would henceforth be nothing to me but a nest of bad memories.

  I went through all the stacks of papers. Every line of those of the true Lerne confirmed his medical honesty and the purity of his research on grafting. Those of Klotz-Lerne, easily recognizable by the alterations in the handwriting an often blackened by Gothic script, were the object of a meticulous sorting process, and were incinerated as irrefutable testimony of numerous crimes, in which there was nothing to disprove the involvement a certain Nicolas Vermont, resident at Fonval for six months. Under the pressure of the same concern, I searched the grounds and the surrounding commons. When that was done, I gave the livestock to the villagers, and dismissed Barbe.

  Then I summoned help. Large trunks were stuffed with family possessions, while Emma packed her suitcases, torn between regret for her lost chimera and the pleasure of going to Paris with me.

  Since the death of Klotz-Lerne, eager to return to the tumult of society and the comforts of wealth without the transitory constraints of setting up house, I had written to one of my friends, asking him to rent me an apartment more spacious than my bachelor pad, appropriate to lodge an amorous couple. His reply delighted us. He had found lodgings for us in the Avenue Victor Hugo: a small house made as if to measure and furnished to our taste. Domestic staff, carefully recruited by him, awaited us there.