Who was this Marc Vanel? Like the other two, Jean Fortin and Tchitcherine, he had the illuminated brow of those who frequent the temple of eternal truths.
And this book will display that Man-God.
III. The Red Nest
Dr. Fortin’s house was hidden on the heights of Saint-Cloud, in the middle of an immense, exceedingly unkempt property in which the most beautiful plants and the most magnificent trees mingled with monstrous, vivacious brambles like the lianas of a virgin forest.
Once through the entrance—a modest Norman gate sheltered by a thatch roof—one found oneself in a park run wild, where the pathways, never raked, resembled those vague tracks that one follows in the desert, obstructed from time to time by brushwood. In the place where there had once been lawns, doubtless green and well-trimmed, there were now wild grasses, tall nettles, and an entire frantic vegetation of weeds, from which projected, here and there, the strong stem of a beautiful iris.
All along a ruined wall of stones covered in dense shoots, brambles had grown, which climbed proudly toward the sky, clinging to the trunks of nearby trees and the asperities of the enclosure. As if Beauty had wanted to preserve her rights even so, however, the stems of rose bushes climbed up even higher than the brambles; above the wall, dominating the ruins, the mosses, the weeds and the nettles, magnificent roses blossomed, all the prouder and more beautiful for having defeated the stifling brambles. For years pines had strewn the ground with their needles, falling every autumn, making a beautiful soft carpet in which splendid ferns had grown. Sometimes, in a bushy clump, a syringa branch sprang forth, and the heady odor of its flowers mingled with the scent of pines, embalming the vesperal breeze that slid through the foliage of the trees, rustling the leaves.
Dr. Marc Vanel’s automobile traversed that nature freely. It passed beneath centenarian branches from which twigs of dead wood fell, skirted a pool of murky water covered with nenuphar lilies, brushed superb arums with immaculate calices as it swerved, and then emerged into a clearing in the midst of which the house stood.
It was dilapidated, as seemingly wild as the park. The walls were decrepit in places, the shutters had lost heir paintwork, and in one corner, a piece of broken guttering hung down lamentably from the eaves.
It was bleak and sad, but infinitely delightful, for the ruined house and the abandoned park, the crazed and splendid vegetation like a fragment of virgin forest, a few minutes away from Paris—Paris, whose gray, squat mass was visible here and there through a gap between the branches—all gave the illusion of a distant, chimerical country to which civilization must have come one day, but from which it had withdrawn, perhaps vanquished by the indomitability of dreams.
Above the central block, a belvedere was outlined against the sky like the lantern of a lighthouse; it was a glass cage, octagonal in form, covered with a green-tinted copper dome and ringed by a light gallery to which the doors of two divided panels gave access.
As the automobile stopped in front of the dwelling, where no life seemed to be manifest, an enigmatic being, a household god, appeared at the top of the perron. On the threshold of such a house, he evoked the idea of a phantom, a revenant of yore, a valet of some defunct epoch, for it was impossible to believe that such an edifice was inhabited.
“Frédéric,” said Professor Fortin, “there’ll be two more people for dinner. Do you have the necessary?”
At that news, the domestic’s face did not reflect any astonishment. The house was welcoming, the master prodigal, and it was not rare for people from various worlds to be guests at the “Red Nest.”11 Frédéric merely thought that they did not always come by auto; it was an unusual sight.
“Well,” Fortin added, as he got down, “You’re used to these unexpected occurrences. Don’t look so glum.”
Without replying, Frédéric hastened to the door of the limousine, his eyes filled with a sudden joy. “Monsieur Vanel! Oh, how glad I am…!”
“Frédéric! Still the same, you old rascal!”
Marc Vanel held out his hands to the domestic. He seemed slightly emotional.
Dr. Fortin noticed that. “Aha!” he said. “It does something to you, eh, to see the old family again?”
“Yes,” Marc replied, in a dull voice. “One deceives oneself; one imagines that one is armored, rendered insensitive, because one has suffered in the midst of anonymous faces, far away, and has voluntarily raised barriers between oneself and the past. One thinks that one has abolished sentiments; one imagines that one has become skeptical and misanthropic, and is glad of that new state of mind, which protects against dolor…and then, one evening, it’s sufficient to see an old abandoned park, similar, save for a few weeds, to the old park in which one once dreamed, to stir the heart. It’s sufficient to see a tumbledown house in which one once spent laborious hours, to upset the soul. And the bonjour of a worthy servant who remembers you moves you, without meaning to, in the utmost depths of your being...”
“A proof, my dear chap, that you loved us dearly,” said Dr. Fortin.
“And that we loved you, too, Monsieur Vanel,” added the domestic. “That’s why you’re moved, on finding the age-old park, the old roof it hides, and your friends.”
While Frédéric took possession of Vanel, Tchitcherine, slightly astonished to find himself in the décor of that lost land, turned to Dr. Fortin, smiling.
“I’ve just come back from America, where I spent, for propaganda purposes, days and nights of feverish activity in the bosom of populous and airless cities, in the sad workers’ districts of San Francisco, New York and Chicago—everywhere I could win a few souls to our cause—and it’s only today, near Paris, that I can admire a veritable virgin forest.”
Marc Vanel interrogated Frédéric while looking at him. The domestic was a curious individual. Physically, he was a sort of mountain giant, dark and stiff, with the sunburned face of a Pyrenean shepherd. There was not a gram of fat on his muscles, as tough and long as ropes. His eyes seemed to be full of a mild and distant nostalgia, in which one divined all the primitive poetry of the Basque country.
The man was sober in all things. He had never committed any excess, and spoke very little. Endowed with the strength of a brown bear, if which he retained the somewhat abrupt manners, perhaps because he had once done battle with them when he lived in the mountains, it was sufficient for him to have the care of this well-isolated house. He was a kind of legendary devoted domestic, a figure from a distant past, an old friend of the family—domi amicus—who had his immutable place at its hearth.
“Where’s Jeanne, then?” asked Vanel. “I don’t see her.”
“When she’s busy with her inventions, the devil couldn’t make her come out. I think that if the house caught fire, she would only save herself when she’d finished her experiments. Oh, she’s not like the rest! Georges Garnier knows something about that—here she comes!”
A young woman has just appeared on the perron: a blonde beauty, healthy and harmonious, resplendent with life and intelligence. All of her external appearance, her gestures and her gait, revealed a slightly girlish grace. She advanced toward Marc Vanel, her hand extended.
“Bonjour, Marc; I’m very glad to see you again.” She addressed her childhood friend, the collaborator in her first endeavors as tu without the slightest embarrassment, like a comrade.
Animated by similar sentiments, Vanel explained, in a few words, how he had returned to France in the company of the Muscovite revolutionary. He was silent about what he had done during the years he had spent abroad, but he enthused over his friend, whom he introduced warmly to the young woman.
In a few phrases pronounced in Russian, Jeanne Fortin told Tchitcherine that the cause he was defending found echoes in her. Something of a revolutionary by temperament, and even an anarchist in her ideas, she fully understood the audacity of having brought down the formidable edifice of the Tsars, whose foundation rested on the oppression of so many centuries.
“I admire you,” she sai
d, holding out her hand to him. “My good wishes accompany you.” She turned to Marc Vanel. “And you? You left one day because nothing in France interested you any longer—neither your contemporaries, nor science, nor your collaborators. You could only have chosen as a friend a man of great worth and an immense ambition for upheaval.”
Marc Vanel tried to protest.
“Don’t defend yourself. I know your misanthropy, in which there is probably more egotism than you think. Fundamentally, I understand it: our contemporaries aren’t amusing, I agree, and only the study of their souls, their vices and even their amours incites me to seek a source of pleasure in the frequenting of human beings—but you were wrong to leave, Marc, for there are…other things.”
“Such as what, Jeanne?”
“Science—the search for the great mystery of life and death. Oh, if you knew what excitement we’ve felt here, sometimes…what incomparable minutes we’ve lived...”
Vanel smiled strangely. “How do you know, Jeanne, that I haven’t lived unforgettable minutes myself?”
She looked at him long and hard, and then said: “Indeed, why would your marvelous intelligence have rested? With you, does one ever know? Perhaps, Marc, you’ve learned more than we have...”
He made no reply. His gaze fixed upon a sunbeam caressing the leaf of a nenuphar on the glaucous water of the pond; that kiss of light posed like a drop of molten gold on a gigantic emerald.
In the fading daylight, the garden resembled a forest in a distant country, a troubling evocation of a corner of an uncultivated paradise. A pheasant passed through the branches of the tall trees, above the wild grass of ancient lawns; as it had bright plumage, one might have taken it for a bird of paradise, a fabulous creature born of the tropics, virgin lands beyond the sea.
Everyone had now fallen silent, and Marc Vanel contemplated Jeanne as one studies an enigma, for Dr. Fortin’s daughter was, in physical terms, an extraordinary and disconcerting masterpiece. At twenty-seven, she was a flower of flesh divinely blooming: beautiful, with abundant short blonde hair, gilded like the sun, cut short at the nape in a tomboyish fashion, red lips, rather tall with a full figure, simple and rhythmic in her gestures. Desire stretched out toward her. Quickly, however—even very quickly—one revised that impression, caused uniquely by the generous splendor of an excessively beautiful body and a face that was too perfect. The eyes had a cold, rather hard gaze, in which nothing amorous was reflected. It was in vain, too, that one would have searched there for the clear radiance of happy thoughts, girlish frivolities and puerile ingenuousness—those subtle and delightful details, the adorable grace of young women, of which Prince Charmings still dream.
She no longer had anything of the slightly perverse seductiveness of the demi-virgin, uneasy, anxious and bold. Nor was there anything in her eyes of what is usually readable in the irises of young women; all that was manifest there was the power of a profound and serious mind, and the flash of a superior intelligence haunted by an elevated ideal. The lips were red, to be sure, but they remained cold. The visage, harmonious and pure, retained, in spite of its physical beauty, the gravity of the laborious study of arduous and indecipherable scientific problems.
And the ensemble of that singular flowering was combined in a being as complicated, magnificent and powerful as the great sphinx of Egypt near the pyramids, but dazzling with youth, gleaming with freshness, and all the immortal beauty of Aphrodite.
Marc Vanel, whose profound, sharp eyes, charged with radium, scanned the perfections of the troubling statue boldly, found there the soul of a committed scientist with unignited senses in the impeccable body of a tennis player or a Greek courtesan. He recalled the last words of the domestic Frédérique and understood now, on contemplating the intelligent visage that seemed to carry the imprint of arid preoccupations, why Venus did not smile on those exceedingly cold lips. And yet, what beautiful flesh for amour! Involuntarily, he imagined the magnificent and supple forms agitated by the emotion of tender sentiments, but the firm and gentle assault of a lover—himself, Vanel. Himself!
A tall blond fellow, the same age as Jeanne, appeared: admirably well built, with pink flesh, whose face revealed a cheerful nature but a slightly complicated soul, all generosity.
“That’s Georges Garnier,” said Dr. Fortin, in a low voice, to Vanel. “As he doesn’t lack intelligence and good will, we took him on to please Alexandre Garnier, an old friend of the family. Georges is, in any case, a pleasant collaborator, who renders us many services.
Marc Vanel shook Georges Garnier’s hand effusively, and could not help feeling a certain compassion in catching a dolorous glance directed by the young man at Jeanne Fortin, who was deep in conversation with the revolutionary Tchitcherine. Georges went toward them.
Now Jeanne Fortin and Georges Garnier formed a group whose silhouettes stood out against the green of the trees in a kind of luminous atmosphere gilded by the rays of the declining sun.
Frédéric came to announce that dinner was served.
“What about Garnier?” exclaimed Fortin. “Where’s Alexandre?” He turned to Georges. “Hasn’t your father arrived? He’s always the same—turning up late for dinner and finding reasons to justify himself.” Then he turned to the group of friends. “I’ll show you the house: the Red Nest.”
They went in. On the ground floor there was a kitchen and storerooms containing accessories and chemical products, along with Frédéric’s lodgings, a bathroom with the supreme comforts of hydrotherapy, and the foot of a broad staircase leading to the upper floors.
On the first floor there was the dining room, the library, Dr. Fortin’s laboratory and a kind of multipurpose room full of complicated accessories of mysterious form.
On the second floor there were bedrooms: the doctor’s, his daughter’s and three others without assignment, in which friends slept when it was too late to go back to Paris after prolonged meetings or passionate endeavors that were sometimes prolonged until dawn.
Above that was the belvedere.
Going back down to the first floor, Dr. Fortin ushered his friends into the dining room, whose large bay window overlooked the immense park.
“Well,” he said, indicating the spectacle of the hectic foliage around them, “don’t you think it’s more beautiful than the trimmed lawns and symmetrical well-graveled pathways?”
The view was, indeed, splendid. Instead of flowerbeds and neatly ordered shrubs, magnificent irises grew amid the grasses. Beneath the trees there was an astonishing undergrowth in which, among the flowering thornbushes and nettles, the yellow note of clumps of primroses sounded. Wood violets timidly dotted their bright patches at the feet of oaks, alongside lilies of the valley, and in the high branches, birds’ nest entertained a delightful and noisy life. In the abandoned park, returned by humans to nature, it seemed that the furtive beasts of the surrounding area had taken refuge, for rabbits were playing on the edge of a warren and birds of every species, reassured and conscious of being in their own domain, were singing recklessly in the foliage, as if to salute the splendid firework display that the setting sun was creating in the thickets.
“On certain evenings in Java,” Marc Vanel said, “isolated in clearings at dusk, when the brush was moving all around me, doubtless traversed by some fleeing animal, and a wing gleamed in the fire of the last sunbeam in the branches of a nearby tree, I thought of you, Jeanne, and this park, and also this family table beside the open window. I regretted, then, being so far away...”
Jeanne Fortin considered Vanel curiously. She had known him as a disillusioned misanthrope in the epoch when he had fled, but now a strange sensibility was manifest in him, after years spent among people of all races. Why? Was it because he had grown a little older? Because he had meditated, far away, on the dangers of the absolute? Or had he known frightful miseries, previously unsuspected, that made him appreciate, this evening, the simple charm of the dwelling and the amity of his hosts?
“Oh,” she said, “you mus
t have learned a great deal in the course of your travels. You’ll enrich me with your experience and your acquisitions, won’t you?”
“The avidity to know everything still grips you, Jeanne?”
“Yes, Marc. Don’t worry—I’ll get you to talk.”
The sun had disappeared now behind the hill. Oblique, violent, almost red rays slid beneath the trees or nested in the clumps of wild plants. A play of daylight fused, like phosphorescence, with the golden dust between the branches of a magnolia, and it seemed that the red rays were fixed in the calices of the superb flowers. A bird suddenly flew through the beams where the golden dust was dancing, its wings so rutilant and sparkling that one might have thought them facets of a diamond.
Already, though, behind the trees, a light gray mist was rising slowly from the Seine, extending like a veil of dreams over the valley through which the river snaked.
At that moment, the electric doorbell announced a visitor.
Georges hurried away. “It’s my father. He’s not so very late today.”
Indeed, shortly afterwards, Dr. Garnier shook everyone’s hand cordially.
“Just in time, Papa Garnier,” said Jeanne, gaily. “This time, we’d only have left you the bones, because there are too many of us.”
“Bah!” replied the doctor. “Frédéric would have found something for me.”
“Let’s go to table!” said Fortin. “That lecture at the Académie des Science has hollowed out my stomach.”
IV. A Marriage Request
Dinner had just finished.
“Messieurs,” said Jeanne Fortin, “we have the habit of taking coffee in the belvedere, and as the spring night is beautiful this evening, the location won’t lack charm, as you’ll see.
Already, Georges Garnier had hastened after her to the little staircase that connected the first floor to the terrace of the house. He was followed by Vanel and Tchitcherine.
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