Dr. Fortin knew from experience that it was not easy to make Jeanne renounce an idea. In any case, he was very curious himself to know what would become of his daughter’s attempt. He did not persist. Furthermore, as if she were about to accomplish some fabulous rite, the strange Valkyrie was already preparing bizarre instruments, with surfaces as bright, beautiful and shiny as jewels.
“Quickly, Father!” she said, in a slightly emotional voice. “You have to set up the big battery. In the meantime, I’ll finish preparing the culture of artificial blood that we developed together, which has given such marvelous results on various animals.”
The scientist disappeared briefly. In the next room the singular hum of machines became audible, and two or three sparks spurted forth abruptly, illuminating the doorway with their blue flames.
While those preparations were going on, Jeanne worked on the cadaver. She had soon laid the unfortunate young man’s neck vertebrae bare, for it was necessary, before anything else, to repair the fracture with the aid of a solder whose secret she alone knew. The bones were quickly set back in place.
While she was operating, a large sealed glass jar was warming in an immense waterbath placed on the stove. From time to time she checked a thermometer indicating the temperature of the artificial blood contained in the jar. All this was accomplished with precision, like the phases of a priestly ritual.
Now Dr. Fortin helped his daughter open the subject’s chest, because it was necessary to expose the heart in order better to supervise the artificial labor they were about to demand of it.
While operating, Jeanne said: “Presently, the subject is out of any danger, since he’s dead. We can, therefore, act without fear, until the moment of resurrection.”
Her movements were confident and precise as he went about her difficult work, and her face was calm. Only her gleaming eyes testified to her impatience to get to the end of the attempt and discover the result. Now, aided by her father, she devoted herself to a curious task, introducing into the vena cava the extremities of two glass tubes linked by rubber tubing to two pumps, one aspiring and the other expelling; she thus established a flow that set the blood that had already decomposed in motion again, expelling it from the veins, the heart and all the organs, which would not take long to be poisoned. Soon, she sent the artificial blood into the empty conduits, mixed with sodium chloride, in order to wash the vessels more thoroughly and purify them.
She stopped.
“It’s going well,” she said. “The body is rid of toxins. One more irrigation with seawater.”
When that was finished, she began pumping the artificial blood, suitably warmed, into an artery. Soon, the cadaver warmed up in its turn, while the pumps maintained an incessant artificial circulation.
“Touch the feet,” said Jeanne to her father.
“They’re warm.”
“It’s working, it’s working. Let’s try now to get the heart moving again by stimulating the action of the muscles.”
They applied electric shocks supplied by the batteries at the appropriate places. Fortin supervised them while Jeanne put pressure on the heart in a rhythmic fashion. After half an hour of effort, they observed joyfully that the organ of life was beating by itself, normally. When the stimulators were withdrawn, the heart continued beating. Jeanne breathed deeply.
“Now,” she said, in a anxious voice, “we need to know whether it will continue when the pumps stop.”
“Let’s try,” said Fortin.
They were nervous, however, and their hands were trembling. Already, the result was miraculous. They wanted to enjoy the success and prolong it, for neither of them dared believe that the result would surpass what they had obtained. So they hesitated before withdrawing the glass tubes from the orifices through which they were infusing the warm blood—but it was necessary to act. While the doctor removed one of the tubes, abruptly, Jeanne applied a fibrin tampon to the lips of the incision. Then, skillfully, she made the necessary suture, and they went on to the other tube.
As she stopped the pump, the young woman could not help feeling a real oppression. Her face was frightfully white, her features drawn and her lips pursed. It seemed that the life was ebbing away from her own being as it reappeared in the inanimate being that she was trying to resuscitate.
“Victory!” proclaimed Fortin. “The heart’s still beating. Let’s close all this up, quickly!”
“Yes, said Jeanne, breathlessly. “The blood’s penetrating everywhere. Life is animating the body. Let’s try to maintain it there.”
They had soon sewn up the chest. Then, without pausing, they moved on to the lungs. Operating as on a drowning victim, they opened the subject’s mouth, pulled his tongue by means of forceps and carried out rhythmic tractions, combined with pressures on the chest and movements of the arms. In her impatience to discover the result, Jeanne did not hesitate to put her mouth over that of the cadaver and blow into it, desperately, the air of her own feverish breath, into which she injected all her will.
And that frightful kiss, at that sublime hour, that virgin kiss given to the corpse of a stranger, was terrible and magnificent. Jeanne Fortin resembled an admirable goddess learning over the inert matter, creating life after the fashion of God. And the father, confronted by that scene, admired his child.
Suddenly, however, Jeanne threw herself backwards. She had just experienced the disturbing sensation that the dead man was returning her kiss,
“Oh, Jeanne!” cried Fortin. “He’s alive, he’s breathing. Oh, my daughter! You’ve vanquished death!”
“Not yet,” said Jeanne, in a muted voice.
Her face anxious, she remained in dolorous contemplation of her incomplete work. Mute and somber, her face striped by a hard crease, her eyes filled with a frightful desperation, she gazed at the being laid out on the marble table, the warm flesh, like that of other men, in which the blood was circulating beneath the skin: the body in which a heart was beating, the lungs of which were inflating with pure air—and which, however, was not alive.
Fortin understood to—but he was hopeful even so, and was distressed by the sight of Jeanne’s face.
“Look,” he said. “The chest is rising and falling like that of a living man.”
“This one is still dead.”
“The heart, the source of life! The heart, Jeanne—listen to how it’s beating!”
“Like a machine. The man is still dead.”
“But what about the eyes? The eyes, which are looking at you, Jeanne—the eyes, which are blinking in the excessively bright light!”
“Those eyes aren’t alive.”
“But Jeanne...”
“Oh, shut up, Father. Shut up! I’m too unhappy!”
And for the first time in his life, the old scientist was witness to an extraordinary event, which he had never imagined: he saw his daughter weep.
He leapt forward then, took her in his arms like a child, and rocked her, coddled her and covered her with kisses. Before those first tears he was utterly astonished, and also distressed by his inability to put an end to such sadness, whose cause he knew.
Jeanne was like a little girl who had irredeemably broken a beloved doll—and he, in order to console her, found the words of a father who suffers because his child is suffering. He discovered, at his age, a puerile tenderness that he had not suspected.
Calmed, Jeanne resumed her grim expression. In brief, curt phrases proffered in a dull, anxious voice, she moaned: “We’re mad! Yes, mad…poor lunatics. We’ve had this stupid dream…us, humans…of creating beings similar to us…or, rather, of reviving the dead, which is the same thing. Creating life! Well, father, how crazy are we, eh? We were fabulously proud and stupid to think that we were capable of accomplishing God’s work! God—which is to say, the synthesis of the mysteries that surround us…for that’s what we wanted to do, isn’t it? We, miserable mortals, vain and pretentious beings, wanted to create a man, to be a god. God! Do you hear, Father? God!”
&n
bsp; She burst out laughing—strident and tragic laughter—and Fortin looked at his daughter with fearful eyes.
“Jeanne, my daughter!” he cried. “You’re going mad!”
She understood his anguish and reassured him.
“Calm down, Father. We’ve only had one folly: that of supposing ourselves capable of doing divine work. At this moment, however, I am, unfortunately, too lucid, for I can see and understand the inanity of our research, of our experiments, even of our science, and everything. Yes, the inanity of everything, since it can’t lead to anything. What have we done? We’ve taken a cadaver, we’ve given it new blood, after having repaired it, removing the cause determining death. We’ve succeeded in making its heart beat, making its lungs function, and its limbs—all its organs, in sum—and we’ve arrived at this lamentable result: we’ve fabricated a machine! Yes, a machine: a machine that can walk, of course, but which only walks when it’s made to walk. People have been making machines for thousands of years, Father, more or less.”
The scientist protested, reluctantly: “With inert matter, yes—with wood and metals, I’ll grant—but no one, before you, has ever made one with dead flesh.”
“What does it matter? What good does it do us to have half-resuscitated a cadaver? It exists, that’s certain. If we make it eat by stuffing it with food, it will continue to exist. So long as we carry out the necessary actions in its stead, the natural functions of its body will be accomplished. It’s even probable that I’ll succeed in making it speak—but it will only say the words that I think, for it has no thought of its own.”
“However, Jeanne, if the brain is healthy, if it functions, why shouldn’t the man live again, veritably and completely, since the brain creates thought, will, movement…since the entire body obeys it?”
“Why, Father? You haven’t understood, then? I’ve given the man blood again, I’ve reanimated his breath, I’ve repaired, if you wish, the fracture that could have annihilated the brain, but I haven’t been able to give him what it isn’t in my power to create...”
“What’s that?”
“A soul.”
The old scientist started. “The soul,” he muttered. “The mysterious, impalpable fluid of unknown origin, of which the brain is merely the mechanical interpretation? And to think that I made a sensational speech to the Académie yesterday on that subject. What irony! We’ve been stopped by the deceptive enigma, and we know nothing about it…nothing, except the little society game that I permitted myself that afternoon.”
Grimly, implacable logical, Jeanne Fortin continued: “The priests are right; we’re double beings, composed of a mortal envelope and a mysterious, impalpable spiritual fluid. Look at that man. What a proof he is of that affirmation! The brain commands, that’s understood, and the brain obeys thought, which creates movement, action; the brain is only the switchboard, the recorder, the book of memory. But don’t forget, Father, that the brain is an organ itself. Thus, as an organ, it receives life from a force we don’t know—the soul, if we give it that name. And if we don’t accept that thesis, we fall back into the heart of mystery, of chaos.
“Why are we beings accomplishing logical, coordinated action? Because we have a spirit that decides and regulates actions. Why does our bran command one action rather than another? Because our soul orders it to do so. And that’s why I’m despairing. This dead man is no longer dead. The organs of life are functioning, including the brain—but he’ll only live again if I give him a soul. Now, Father, I ask you—where am I going to get a soul?
“And if it were possible; if one could miraculously procure the soul of some individual in order to give it to him, what purpose would it serve, since the other body, deprived of its spirituality, would no longer be good for anything? Oh, I feel discouraged, weary, in the face of that impenetrable mystery, this void...”
Having said that, she sat down, and put her head in her hands. For a long time she remained like that, in a meditative attitude, and her father did not dare trouble her reflection.
Suddenly, she stood up, uttering an exclamation: “That’s it! That’s it, Father! Eureka! Come with me—we’re going to wake Georges.”
Fortin did not understand. A secret anguish caused him to stiffen, to hesitate instinctively, without knowing why. But the terrible young woman pushed him in front of her. So, leaving the living corpse lying on the marble table, where it remained immobile, its visage cold, its eyes not reflecting any thought, they went out of the laboratory.
X. Of What a Young Woman Dreams
Georges Garnier was sleeping peacefully. Jeanne and her father came into his room, and contemplated him for a moment before waking him.
He loves me! thought the young woman. Poor fellow! But is his love as great, as absolute as he claimed a little while ago, when he made me such brilliant confessions? We shall see...
She touched him on the shoulder and called “Georges! Georges! Come on, Georges!”
He opened his eyes, closed them again, and then opened them wider, amazed to see her there beside his bed.
“What is it?” he asked, anxiously sitting up.
“I need you, Georges, for a great sacrifice. Are you awake? Do you understand me?”
He considered her. “Yes,” he said, “I’m awake. What is it?”
She placed her hands on his shoulders, looked into his eyes, and, putting all her soul into a gaze that made the young man shudder, she said, in a breathless voice: “At this moment, Georges, downstairs, I’m interrupted in a decisive experiment for lack of an element that you alone can give me. Listen: a little while ago, the cadaver of a man arrived, still warm—young and healthy, the windfall, in sum, for which I’ve been waiting for such a long time, and of which I was beginning to despair. You know what a proof I can attempt with that, how sure I am of the result...”
“Yes, Jeanne, you’ll succeed. So?”
“Well, I’ve begun the proof. The cadaver has been reanimated, new blood is circulating in its veins, the heart is beating, the lungs functioning...”
Georges Garnier looked up at the young woman ecstatically.
“Oh, Jeanne! You’ve succeeded?”
“Yes, but it’s a paltry result. The man thus resuscitated is only a marvelous automaton, incapable of doing anything by himself, unable to make the slightest reflective gesture, because he doesn’t have, and can’t have thought. The soul has fled the corporeal envelope at the moment of death, and the body that I’ve reawakened is nothing more than a bazaar puppet.”
“Well?”
“Well, Georges, I need a soul, you see! I know that my father, solely by an effort of his will, can cause that of any living human to pass into the body of the unknown man, but that’s not a solution. The unknown would no longer be himself; he would think and act as the person whose spirit he has, temporarily, under the cerebral domination of my father, and the other, during that proof, would be fixed in the immutable attitude of a cadaver.”
His throat tight, Georges Garnier asked: “What are you getting at, Jeanne?”
“This. You’re familiar with my discoveries relating to the life of organic cells. I take a living cell, I place it in a favorable medium, I treat it by means of electrical procedures, and it soon duplicates itself rapidly, multiplying until it forms a complete organ, similar in all respects to the organ from which I took it. By that means I’ve made skin, hearts, livers, lungs and brains. I’ll go even further—and this is where it’s necessary for you to give me your serious attention.
“Down there, I have a healthy human body, absolutely complete. The encephalum has no lesions, but the subject isn’t thinking, isn’t acting, because the spirit no longer inhabits the body, and doesn’t imprint its will on each of the ‘centers’ of the brain whose reflexes constitute life, strictly speaking. What is necessary to restore life to that dead brain? An impulsion coming from a living brain, from which the spirit has never been separated.”
At that moment, Dr. Fortin emerged from his mute role and
came forward. “Jeanne,” he said, gravely, “I don’t suppose you’ve woken Georges up to ask him to offer you his brain?”
“Yes.”
“Wretch...are you mad? And you, Georges—are you naïve enough to continue to listen to her?”
But she exclaimed, in a harsh voice: “Enough! Let me finish. Suppose that I take a part of the brain of a living individual—which is to say, the precious material, still inhabited by the fluid of the spirit, and I take away in that living parcel a part of that spirit. By my care, the centers that I’ve removed from the man, which will not have ceased to live, will take the place of the corresponding centers of the resuscitated man, and thus I will have brought life, along with the spiritual fluid, into what was only an automaton.”
“But your automaton would think like the individual who furnished you with the living substance,” said Fortin.
“No, I wouldn’t touch the centers of thought, intelligence and memory. I would only take the motor centers from Georges. That would suffice to animate my subject.”
“Well, he’d walk, that’s all.”
“He’d live! Because, thanks to my electrical method, the fluid of the motor centers would expand through the brain, and soon, every circumvolution would be impregnated by it. The centers of memory, thought and intelligence, merely asleep, would wake up again, but they wouldn’t lose the benefits of sensations and images recorded during the first phase of life. Friends, the man revived in that fashion would be as he was before his death.”
Dr. Fortin shook his head. “After all, what you say there is possible—but what would become of Georges in the meantime?”
“Deprived of motor centers, he’d scarcely be valiant, poor fellow, and perhaps, for long days, the other circumvolutions, affected, would be insensible—but thanks to the discovery of the reproduction of cells, I’ll quickly repair the damage. It will only be a passing moment.”
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