Alexandre Garnier held Dr. Fortin back. “Listen,” he said. “I have something serious to say to you. We’ll join the young people in a little while.”
“It must be very grave, what you have to say to me?”
“Yes, my friend, it’s important.”
“Speak, then, but speak quickly, for, after having said goodnight to Vanel and his friend, I’m going to shut myself away to work.”
Alexandre Garnier adopted a contrite expression. “Don’t rush me, because I’m slightly emotional, and as I’m afraid that I won’t succeed in my request...”
“A request, you say? And you fear failure? Is there something, then, that I can refuse you? You intrigue me, Garnier. Let’s go into the library.”
When they were installed in the tranquil library, facing one another, Garnier said to Fortin: “My old comrade, our friendship has lasted for thirty years. We knew one another when we were interns at the Charité, and since then, no shadow has ever tarnished the sentiment that unites us.”
“Is something going to change that?”
“Not between us, no, but we have to think about our children.”
“Our children? But Jeanne and Georges are the best of friends.”
“They can’t always be friends.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, don’t you see anything? You haven’t noticed that my son is in love with your daughter?”
Dr. Fortin rose to his feet in a single movement. “Georges is in love with Jeanne?” he exclaimed. He went to Garnier and took his hands. “My poor friend,” he said, “that’s a great misfortune. I feel sorry for you, and I feel sorry for Georges.”
“Why is it a misfortune? You’re refusing us Jeanne’s hand?”
Fortin smiled palely. “I have no say in the matter, alas. But Jeanne is perfectly well able to refuse by herself.”
“Why? If she doesn’t love Georges now, there’s no reason why she might not allow herself to be seduced by his qualities in time. And if you help us a little, if you put your paternal authority at our service...”
Grumbling philosophically, Fortin protested: “My paternal authority? Can any authority whatsoever be exercised over such a nature? Oh, one might think that you didn’t know Jeanne—but my poor friend, she’ll never marry, because she’ll never love a man. Jeanne? She has no heart—not, at least, a heart for love…love as other women understand it.”
“She’s not a monster, though! And she’s so beautiful! She’s not insensible, either, since she has a great deal of affection for you, and in a temperament where there’s room for affection, there’s room for love.”
“You’re mistaken. Jeanne doesn’t love me as a father. She has a great deal of amity for me because I’m her collaborator. We’ve lived the same fevers, the same torments, in pursuing similar chimeras, and we’ve shivered with the same pleasure in the face of a problem finally resolved. That has created powerful bonds between us, which didn’t exist before. Look, I’ll amaze you: if I weren’t the researcher who has done much for science, if I were an insignificant cretin, as her father, I’d only have her utter indifference.”
“Is that possible, Fortin?”
“Yes, old man. She loves us—you, me, Vanel, Georges and, this evening, that extraordinary Russian—because we’re elite individuals with whom she can speak a familiar language, but she has no sex. She has an amity for Georges, who helps her in her work, but she’ll never perceive that he’s a male.”
“But don’t you think that, by virtue of that constant intimacy...”
“No, I repeat that Jeanne is utterly ignorant, and doubtless always will be, of all the emotions of her gender. We can’t do anything about that. She’s a woman who has but one ideal: science, and one passion: study. The rest doesn’t count.”
Alexandre Garnier became exasperated. “But you seem to be rejoicing in a monstrosity, wretch. One might think, damn it, that you’re proud of having raised that abnormal, amoral creature.”
“I’m not proud of it, but I don’t regret it. Of what am I guilty? Having had an elite intelligence at my disposal, I haven’t sought to turn it away from the sublime goal that seemed to impassion her as soon as she was at an age to think: the research of the great mystery and the conquest of the Unknown. For what are you reproaching me? For not having made of her a ridiculous doll, a pretty mannequin, painted and prettified, who sings, dances, laughs and chatters like a parrot, like her mother, who caused me so much suffering? For not having dressed her up for the satisfaction of some Monsieur, probably an unknown, who would have debauched, toyed with her and corrupted her? That’s doubtless what would have happened, since my daughter has a considerable dowry. Well, no, I preferred to maintain her like a virgin plant, and she’s grown up here, in this wild nature, solely at the whim of her instincts—which are pure, I give you my word on that!”
“The plants of the virgin forest couple and reproduce.”
“Well then, don’t worry—if Jeanne ever feels the need to marry her flesh to a complementary flesh, she won’t come to me to ask permission, and she’ll accomplish the act very simply and sanely, in the manner of beings who only depend on themselves.”
Alexandre Garnier leapt to his feet. “But you’re insane! These are callous theories you’re putting forward now—you, a member of the Institut! Doubtless for the sake of paradox and to take all hope away from me! Do you think, then, wretch, that it’s possible to live differently than other men? You and I are part of a civilized society, whether you like it or not, whose laws and customs we’ve accepted. Let’s leave these absurd ideas and get back to reason. Jeanne is of an age to assume a position in the world. She’s rich and beautiful, undoubtedly, but Georges isn’t a bad match.”
“Let’s not talk about interests,” Dr. Fortin replied, curtly. “I repeat that Jeanne is entirely her own mistress. If your son can conquer her, which I doubt, she’ll give herself to him freely, but I believe that there’s no need to discuss, at present, the question of money.”
“You’re terrible!” exclaimed Garnier. “And you and your daughter make an extraordinary family. Oh, I’m no longer astonished now, by the singular ideas that I’ve discovered in my son. In truth, I’m wondering whether I don’t have the right to address reproaches to you.”
“I don’t believe so. What harm is there in a new social estate? Have we, then, to be proud of the present one? We see nothing around us but adulteries, divorces and patched-up arrangements. Children have one mother and several fathers. It’s a mess of flagrant immortality, and you want me to adhere to it? No—a hundred times no! But shall we leave this painful conversation? There are questions that nothing in the world can cut through. Here, we’re in the presence of an irreducible fact: Jeanne isn’t marriageable.”
“She’s not marriageable? Why? I’ll tell you why—it’s because your frightful egotism has made her into a kind of asexual monster, an astonishing prodigy who’s necessary to you to resolve your hard scientific problems. Come on—you’re afraid of losing your pupil!”
“My pupil? But, you poor fellow, I’m only a child by comparison with her! Jeanne is my master! Do you understand that? She’s not a woman, she’s a genius, an incarnation of thought. The most seemingly inaccessible summits where the secrets of nature lie, she will attain, on her own. She’ll astonish the world! So, would you care to tell me, what can the petty passions and miseries of our perishable flesh and the sufferings of our vanity matter to her? The amorous sighs of a naïve young man who wants to imprison all that life, that immense life, in a poor kiss?”
Vanquished, Alexandre Garnier was content to murmur: “We don’t have the same comprehension of our roles on this earth; me, I’m only an old man, a trifle sensitive, who would like to embrace his grandchildren...”
Fortin put a hand on his shoulder. “There are women appropriate to those needs. My daughter is pursuing another goal. Let her follow her destiny and advise your son to seek elsewhere for an ideal creature who will understand h
im.”
“He’ll have to do that—for, with your theories, it would soon be the end of the world, and there’d be no more family and society.”
“So much the better!” exclaimed Fortin, rubbing his hands. “If the imbecilic, hypocritical and corrupt old world disappears, another will be born, in a splendid aurora of beauty and truth! In the meantime, in order for the race not to become extinct, I don’t want all women to resemble my daughter. Let others make a vow of fecundity, but intellectual virgins are necessary for the races and cities of the future, as the Messiah once was for the great religious swell that stirred the peoples...”
Alexandre Garnier bowed his head. He felt that he was confronted by different, irreducible beings, and he understood that all obstinacy would be vain. He murmured: “I understand, in fact, why you said to me just now that love was a misfortune. But what would be ever sadder would be to see my son infected by the chimeras that your daughter and you defend.”
Abruptly, Fortin said: “Take that back.”
“Too late—the harm is done.”
“What’s the conclusion, then?”
Resigned, Alexandre Garnier stood up and said: “Let’s go join the others in the belvedere.”
“Ten o’clock! Animal, you’ve made me waste my time!” He opened his hands, with which he threatened Garnier: “I could strangle you!” Then, hugging him to his bosom, he said: “My poor old friend, let me embrace you…”
V. The Center of the Universe
Eleven o’clock in the evening. Dr. Alexandre Garnier, saddened by Fortin’s refusal to give Jeanne to his son Georges, had gone back to Paris. As for Georges Garnier, the poor infatuated fellow was preparing anatomical specimens in the laboratory for the moment when the young woman came down.
In the glass cage of the belvedere overlooking the sleeping park, while the surrounding area, the hills and the countryside were melting away into the night and the silence, Jeanne Fortin, Marc Vanel, Techitcherine and Jean Fortin were talking.
“So,” said Jeanne to the Soviet commissar delegated to Foreign Affairs, “you’re going back to Russia? And you’re confident?”
Tchitcherine’s face became animated.
“Yes,” he said, “I’m confident. Yes. If our Revolution were to perish, it would have happened a long time ago. Your capitalists constantly throw our long terror and military imperialism at our heads, but they don’t want to understand that we were forced to that. Here, in 1793, you had to sustain a terrorist regime for fifteen months, and that might have saved your Revolution temporarily; nevertheless, when repression got the upper hand, you had the Directoire and the Empire and years of wars. Fortified by the examples of history, we want to avoid that reversion, because a reaction in our country would be terrible.
“We’re confronted by thirty million people, the majority of whom don’t know how to read, with a large number of intellectuals to guide them. In our country there are more than a hundred million peasants, not only illiterate, but almost brutes, curbed by a long atavism of slavery and alcoholism. And how many of us are there at the head of the revolutionary movement? Scarcely a hundred veritable purists, and perhaps a thousand ambitious opportunits behind and around us, who are faithful to us because we give them a meaningful identity. If a reactionary movement powerful enough to buy them and promise them pardon and impunity comes along, they’ll go over to the enemy. Do you believe, within those circumstances, we can hold on other than by terror? No, it’s impossible.
“As for our military spirit, we’re forced to that by several reasons. First of all, it’s necessary to enable the workless to live. And if Russia isn’t working, whose fault is it? Europe’s! In any case, without military force, the immensity of Russia would disaggregate, fragmenting into an infinity of petty governments in which all manner of regimes would find directors, guided principally by their own interests. In sum, we need an unshakable military force to keep in check the capitalist states of Europe interested in the restoration of a State similar to theirs. I’m even leaving out of account the fact that a powerful army is necessary to our propaganda, and against the Russian nation itself, which, being ignorant, only understands, as yet, the reasoning of the greatest strength...
“The muzjik combines with that ignorance the egotism of his natural idleness. The possessor of the land, he only wants to work for his own need. It is thus necessary for us to take back that land, little by little, by roundabout means and only to leave him the tenancy. One day, it will be the Land of All, and it’s already no longer the Russias of the Tsar and the Land of a few boyars. It’s also necessary that the peasant should nourish the soldier, since the soldier defends his land. Oh, we’re not yet at the end of all these complexities. And, as I’ve told you, there are not many honest men back there.”
Tchitcherine said these things very simply, but with illuminated eyes and in a tone in which the immense faith that guided his actions was sensible. His listeners had the impression of being face to face with a prodigious and irresistible force condensed in that simple man, physically insignificant—puny, even—but whose gaze full of flames betrayed a grimly willful soul.
Fortin, his daughter and Dr. Vanel pictured the hundred million various subjects camped, it seemed, in immense areas composed of several countries that were almost ignorant of one another, and whose languages were still dissimilar. And in the belvedere, in the middle of a pure spring night, in that cage of glass, a calm individual of anonymous aspect, clad in a clerk’s suit, presaging and advertising a Society of Nations of incalculable range—the Universal Republic—seemed to be holding a considerable fragment of the universe in his gesture…or at least of our Earth, our minuscule world.
“When you’re out there in the midst of the storm,” said Jeanne, “remember that we’re thinking about you.”
“But you also, for Dr. Fortin and you,” the illuminate exclaimed, “are accomplishing by your science an admirable work of life. What you are doing involves more grandeur than there is in my role as a precursor. Me, I want to destroy and annihilate the past. I want to render life to the dormant, immobile strength of a people that, thus far, has been rendered formidable only by its mass. But this afternoon, sitting at the Académie des Sciences with my friend Vanel, when I saw Dr. Fortin capture, dominate and enslave souls, I understood that I’m only an atom compared with him, and I almost had a desire to weep. To be the master of the soul! Of that mysterious personality that one believes to be one’s own, and entirely one’s own, into which no one else can intrude! To be the master of the soul, until now an inviolable and inaccessible tabernacle! Dr. Fortin, capable of procuring us that wealth, the most precious of all, is a god!
“As for me, one of the petty agitators of a great slumbering people, what am I by comparison with Dr. Fortin? In the course of that session I knew the anguish of suddenly sensing myself deprived of my personality, of my will. I was suddenly afraid of seeing my brain vanquished, of no longer being anything but a slave in the hands of a superior being.”
Dr. Fortin smiled. “Reassure yourself—I’m not as far advanced as you think. Although my speech to the Académie des Sciences impressed you, the problem isn’t yet resolved, alas! Certainly, I believe that I know many things concerning the mysterious fluid that is within us. I can succeed in experiments that seem fabulous, but I cannot yet create a soul, nor resuscitate or recover a dead soul in the immortal state. Nevertheless, I feel that I’m on the right track. Soon, perhaps, thanks to Jeanne, I’ll succeed in the fortunate experiment, for my daughter has found something more astonishing than my bagatelles...”
“What is that?” said Marc Vanel and Tchitcherine, in unison.
“She has almost succeeded in the miracle of reanimating life in a cadaver.”
The Russian opened his eyes wide with alarm, and Vanel looked at the young woman admiringly.
“You’ve resolved that problem, Jeanne?” asked Marc.
“Theoretically yes, but practically, I’m stopped by stupid material d
ifficulties, and I have to wait...”
“For what?” asked Vanel.
“The opportunity! For I’m at that point; I feel that my observations are correct and my formulae accurate. I’ve discovered the secret of the formation of cells, deciphered the enigma that permits the reconstitution, phase by phase, of the evolution of life in an inanimate body. Yes, I know all that, I’m sure of not being mistaken, and, having finished with banal and facile laboratory experiments, I find myself halted because it isn’t permissible for me to operate on favorable human material. I can procure cadavers in the amphitheater—I’ve had that authorization for a long time—but I can only work there on specimens that are completely dead…which is to say, when all the organs, tissues and cells are advanced in decay, having become humus, nothing: when it’s too late. And it’s not in my power to reverse nature to that extent.”
“So?” interrogated Vanel.
“So, I’m waiting. One day, perhaps, I’ll have the means of operating on a body that is still warm, from which life has only vanished for a very brief time. If I have the opportunity to set to work before the invading army of destructive microbes, I’ll answer for the success: the cadaver will become a living creature again. He will walk, he will talk, he will think with his brain, and if that is no longer viable”—she paused momentarily, seemingly thinking about something else—“with one that I shall graft into him...
“Three or four imbeciles, because I’m beautiful, have offered me love, fortune, flowers…flowers! I ask you, Vanel, what could I do with them? Flowers! Like a little girl or a dancer. Why don’t they offer me that for which I hope with all my heart: a beautiful adolescent body abruptly scythed down by death? That is the splendid bouquet capable of moving me. Who is the male who will offer me that?”
Marc Vanel looked Jeanne Fortin squarely in the eyes and said, quietly but clearly: “Me.”
“You?”
Homo-Deus Page 5
