The Wing

by Jean Richepin

  And something else that might have prevented Geneviève from being cheerful was the gravity of her life, entirely devoted to the more demanding and most absorbing studies, with her mind narrowly focused to the lofty speculations of modern science, which simultaneously embrace all the problems, linked in an indissoluble chain, of mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology. Even in her work and her meditation, though, her smile undoubtedly found its place, for Geneviève took to it like a good swimmer abandoning herself delightedly to deep water.

  So there was nothing of the female scientist, in the bad sense, about her—any more than there was of the old spinster, in fact, in spite of the famous heptad added to the 25 years, and one could not divine on her forehead either the head-dress of Saint Catherine10 or the mortar-board of the doctor that she could have been in all the sciences.

  “Yes, all of them!” Yvernaux often proclaimed. “All of them, and more.” For it only remained for her to pass some exam or other, or to win some diploma. And it was not merely a doctor of sciences that she could have been, if she had wanted to, but a fully-qualified professor of mathematics, physics, chemistry, and she could taken those qualifications in any order, at the whim of her examiners.

  Sometimes he reproached her—it was his only reproach—for having scorned these official qualifications.

  “Because, at the end of the day,” he said, “that would give you the right to wear the professorial toga, with the red or yellow rabbit-fur border, and at a stroke, you’d amount to something.”

  “Don’t I amount to anything, then?”

  “Not very much, damn it! To be my godchild isn’t enough.”

  “It’s enough for me.” And she embraced her godfather, whom she loved with all her heart. And he, muttering in his beard, his heart bowled over with joy: “To be sure, when one is a genius...”

  And into his beard, whose whiteness was yellowed by beer, rolled tears that were pearls of delight and pride. That emotion might have been that of an old crackpot, a drunkard with the trembling lips of an alcoholic, and that opinion might have manifested itself in the absurd verses of ludicrously-formulated prayers, but in spite of everything, the old drunken crackpot was telling the truth. Geneviève really was a genius!

  II

  “Ah! There’s the crazy old English pastor with his little miss housekeeper! One can set one’s clocks! No error there! Twelve forty-five! Or, to put it another way, a quarter to one!”

  Toward the couple designated in this fashion, an irreverent fork was brandished, charged with a large mouthful of beef wrapped in a parcel of multicolored vegetables—and a loud laugh emphasized the phrases spoken, for the instruction or amusement of the neighbors, by one of the fat cab-drivers at table on the terrace of the Cocher Fidèle. Every morning it was the same, or very nearly, among the diners at the establishment, whose red shop-front, between the Rue Bréa and the Rue de la Grande-Chaumière, brightened up the Boulevard du Montparnasse, presently rather dismal and deserted.

  Almost immediately, on the parallel sidewalk on the other side of the Rue Bréa, the modern-style curtain in the new Esthétic Bar was lifted, and one of its American clients, a male or female painter, or some escapee from the École des Beaux-Arts serving them as assistant and guide, announced the couple, with respect to whom young Yankee humorists exercised an apprenticeship in Parisian wit. There was something akin to a “tennis match” of jokes, in which the majority of the pitifully misdirected balls were called “out,” the best of them having never consisted of anything but pedantic appellations furnished by vague Biblical or Classical memories:

  “Oedipus and Antigone!”

  “Ruth and Boaz!”

  At which only the waiter in the establishment playing host to these “Mark Twains manqué”—as he called them—laughed, as a means of flattery.

  Meanwhile, the couple, who were now going along the Rue Bréa toward the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, were being pointed at from afar by fingers forming horns, at the ends of fists extended by a group of Italian models waiting to pose in the sunniest corner of the Boulevard. And words were whispered by the women, hiding the faces of their fanciullini, and by the old men with the heads of apostles or martyrs—words to ward off the jettatura, formulae against the evil eye of the accursed pair. It was said, in fact, in the group, that the couple comprised a renegade priest and a nun damned for him and by him—who was, moreover, his daughter.

  The couple paid no attention to the gestures of exorcism, which were nevertheless glimpsed when one of them turned round, solicited by the magnetism of the fingers forming the horns. Nor did they see the coarsely mocking faces between the hands lifting the curtain of the Esthétic Bar, and they did not even hear the sonorous laughter of the paunchy cabbies splitting their sides on the terrace of the Cocher Fidèle.

  And to what, indeed, would those two individuals have been able to pay heed in their surroundings, since they did not even seem to be paying any heed to one another? What exterior incident could have distracted them from the intimate distraction in which each was absorbed? One might have thought that they were two strangers marching side by side, two dreams dreamed in parallel, which would never meet.

  Those two dreams, nevertheless, were but one, and those two strangers were father and daughter—but they seemed to have forgotten that. Or, rather, one single thought animated them, outside of which nothing existed; but each of them was following that single thought with a passion so intense as to be walled up in a corridor insolating them from everything around them: even the nearest, dearest and most closely-related person of all.

  So, were the comparisons of the wags, which had the pretension of characterizing them, stupid and inexact? They were certainly not Ruth and Boaz, although the old man had the long hair, the wrinkled visage and the venerable air of a patriarch, while his daughter had the ingenuous, almost child-like gaze and pre-pubescent body of the young Moabite. No more were they Oedipus and Antigone, for they had nothing tragic or ancient in their bearing, and if their eyes were blind to the ambient reality—both Oedipuses, alas—they were illuminated by their dream, a dream of joy and pride. As for any resemblance to an English pastor and his little miss housekeeper, they did not offer the shadow of a shadow of it.

  There remains the gestures of the Italians, and their words explaining the gestures, which approached plausibility a little more closely. The old man was probably not a renegade priest, in fact, but there was something mysteriously sacerdotal about him, that was obvious. And damned or not, for him and by him or not, the girl certainly had the face of a nun, gentle, modest and colorless, suggestive of the frontal band and the shadow of a cornette.

  Finally, the silent couple passing people and things without allowing themselves any distraction, the two individuals walking together as if separately, sharing in a single thought that enveloped them in a halo of ecstasy, gave off a sort of effluvium, clearly perceptible to delicate sense. Some people turned round as they went past—not to laugh or to form horns, but with a vague disquiet, retaining the impression of a strange breath that had caused a frisson to run over their flesh.

  That impression, already felt by them several times before, and which they had just felt again at that very moment, was what two young men of letters, stillborn poets in the chrysalis of journalism freshly disembarked from their province—in the Midi, of course—to conquer Paris, were talking about in a pathway in the Luxembourg. Although the new literary generations do not read Balzac much, they were talking about their desires and sensations with the imagination of their era, which is Balzacian without being aware of it. And this is what one of them was saying:

  “We ought to follow that couple, you know, to spy on them. We’d learn something extraordinary, perhaps with which to reconstitute a romance of blackmail. Damn it! One needs no more in Paris, to make it.”

  To which the other, less ambitious, replied: “We’d only get an interesting item of reportage out of it—but that would be something.”

  A
nd each of them caressed his idea while watching the couple, who had probably come into the gardens by the gate in the Rue Vavin, take the main path leading toward the central flower-beds and from there toward the Panthéon.

  During the month that our two seekers of good opportunities had been coming, quite inconsiderately, to seek one while hanging around in the Luxembourg after a meager breakfast at the creamery, they had already exchanged reflections of this sort almost every day, but they had never made the least effort to act on them. Mouths open, arms dangling, their eyes like Roman candles but their feet nailed to the ground, they contented themselves with dreaming about blackmail, or even fruitful reportage, doubtless waiting for the lark to fall into their mouths ready-roasted.

  And lo! That was exactly, in those express terms, what their friend Sextius Costecalde exclaimed in their ears, making them jump. Their friend, or rather their master: already a reporter in good standing—he said—with a great boulevard paper, where he was already placing 150 or 200 lines time, at two sous per three lines.

  “So,” he said, harshly, “you still imagine that it will write itself, your article? What more do you know about your characters than you knew yesterday? Nothing, I’ll wager. And what will you do to make them sing, smart fellow? And with what stories will you cram your lines, curiosity-seeker? Can you even tell me where they’re coming from, at this hour, the famous couple who give you a frisson, and where they’re going, as they do every day? For you’ve seen them pass this spot every time you’ve been here at ten to one, but you haven’t taken the trouble to wonder if that happens by chance or regularly, have you? Well, it’s every day—and I know that. And I know where they come from, and through what streets. And I’ll give you a spinning-lesson if you want. I’ll tell you how to find out for yourselves the names that I’ve already half-discovered by myself. Something ending in ov—you’ll see.”

  The two apprentices were dazed with admiration, and stunned by Costecalde’s eloquence, and they would have been more firmly rooted to the spot than ever if he had not shaken them, pointing at the couple who were drawing away, and saying to them authoritatively: “Well, get going! Shadow the prey! Quickly! Oh, it’s not difficult! They’re hardly defending themselves—or rather, they’re doing it expressly by seeming inoffensive. No one suspects them—and yet, if you knew…get moving!”

  And, while marching in the tracks of the couple—who, indeed continued to pay no heed to anyone or anything around them—the prodigious Costecalde imparted what he had discovered to his ecstatic novices. “What a mine of lines! What a dairy-cow of reportage, perhaps also of blackmail! For all tastes! Oh, my lads!”

  Every day, at daybreak, the couple left their domicile, not to return until one o’clock in the afternoon, and spent the entire morning at the far end of Vaugirard, in a sort of large wooden cabin situated in the middle of a patch of waste ground. What did they do there? Chemistry. Under what name? That, no one in the neighborhood knew. But here, at the home, into which they would go in a few minutes, that could doubtless be learned, for in the middle of Paris, thanks to concierges...

  “There it is! We’re here! They live in that house. Yes, exactly, that honest old house in the Rue Malebranche, near the Panthéon, yes, a hundred paces from the police station, yes, there, those nihilists. Haven’t you guessed yet that that’s what they are? Now, it’s up to you to ask the name. Something ending in ov, I tell you. We’ll see how clever you are.”

  When the two novices came out of the lodge they were dismayed—and with reason! Even Costecalde nearly fell over in amazement. The couple comprised, the concierge had said, reverently, Monsieur Thibaud Gasguin, “the scientist,” and his daughter, Mademoiselle Geneviève.

  III

  The sole cause of the two apprentice reporters’ dismay was the unexpectedness of the revelation. The nihilist couple with the names ending in ov had become an honest universitarian and his daughter. But the near-collapse of Sextius Costecalde proved, at least, that he was a journalist in the know with regard to celebrities, for the name of Thibaud Gasguin had immediately reminded him of a press campaign mounted nine years before with regard to a petty provincial professor, utterly unknown until then, suddenly acquiring reputation, almost glory, by virtue of several curious discoveries published one after another over six months.

  True, since then, silence had fallen over the name—but not long ago, what a racket there had been in a few papers, polemicizing for or against the government on the back of Thibaud Gasguin! Some had attributed a crime to Official Science, to the offices of Public Instruction, and to its successive ministers, for having so long “hidden such a light, the honor of the fatherland, under a bushel.” Others had inveighed, with bitterness and irony, against “the muffled and tortuous intrigues of clericalism, which nipped in the bud the flight of a free spirit once deflected by the teaching of the seminary, who had escaped therefrom.”

  On these two sides, tendentious biographies had been fabricated, in support of the theses sustained, to which the poor and innocent Gasguin gave appearances of veracity by falling into all the traps set for him by ingenious interviewers. Unfortunately, although the time in question was recent, Sextius Costecalde had not yet been a reporter in good standing with any newspaper. But for that…! He had, however, retained the memory of some of the “information obtained from the best sources”—but contradictory nevertheless—on which the legend of Thibaud Gasguin had been built. And today, all those stories coming back to mind pell-mell, he composed a peacock’s tail from them, which enabled him to strut like a great reporter before his two wonderstruck pupils.

  “Of course,” he said, as he went with them toward the Odéon, where he was supposed to meet Antoine, “I only know him, that Thibaud Gasguin! He must have let his hair grow and no longer wears a beard”—which was a false assumption, Gasguin never having changed his appearance—“otherwise I’d have remembered his face. It was in all the papers at the time. A funny story, though, his. I have it in my files. I could write a pamphlet about it, if I wanted. Perhaps I shall—who can tell? I only need an opportunity—and I’m looking!”

  On which, as a generous fellow is not miserly with his sources, but at a gallop—for it is a long way from the Rue Malebranche to the Odéon—he spewed out a Thibaud Gasguin of fantasy, based for the most part, even so, on accurate details. At any rate, the portrait resembled what Paris imagined, in accordance with the newspapers.

  It was that of a minor provincial teacher—a professor of physics, in fact, at a college in Brittany, doomed to molder away there until his retirement, although he had graduated with a good degree, because he was known to be a former seminarian and as the younger brother of a certain Abbé Denis Gasguin, who had been compromised by some reactionary scandal. Abruptly, that obscure professor had published a paper illuminating the problem of wireless telegraphy. To begin with, the Académie des Sciences had not attached to it the importance of which it was worthy, but an English journal, and then a German one, having devoted studies to the French physicist’s solution, his name had been mingled with those of Branly and Marconi, the inventor who had put the new discovery on a practical footing. At a stroke, the worth of Thibaud Gasguin was appreciated.

  A second communication—on something like the transmission of force by telluric currents, Costecalde affirmed, without guaranteeing the terminology—and then a third, had set Gasguin at odds with illustrious contradictors, over whom he had triumphed. Then the polemics in the press, politics entering into play, the petty provincial professor called to Paris, appointed to a famous chair—Costecalde could not remember exactly which one—and, finally, the unknown of the previous day being hailed as an imminent candidate for the Institut.

  They arrived at the Odéon. The two novices would have liked to know more—especially, why Thibaud Gasguin had suddenly stopped making such good progress, and why he was going to do chemistry incognito at the end of the Vaugirard, and various other things. Entirely intent on his rendezvous with Ant
oine however, the self-important Costecalde left them in suspense with these rapid final items of gossip:

  “Gasguin was given an ox on his tongue, as Sophocles says,11 by virtue of his palm being greased, as Racine says”—Costecalde was not without a certain erudition—“and he was given a cheese, in the form of a laboratory at the École Normale. Then the fellow ruminated, and didn’t produce anything else. That’s it.”

  “But why this chemistry at the far end of Vaugirard?” persisted one of the novices.

  “Yes, and why on a patch of waste ground?” supplied the other, breathlessly.

  “To make imbeciles talk.” Such was the peremptory response of Sextius Costecalde, who knew no more in any case, and who planted them there, under the arcades, haring off into the Odéon, where he had only to meet up with his girl-friend, a second duenna, already an old laureate of the Conversatoire.

  Reduced to their own feeble light, the two pupil reporters agreed in concluding that Gasguin was doubtless carrying out mysterious research in a private laboratory, situated on the far side of Vaugirard specifically in order that no one should know of its existence, on a patch of waste ground in order to cater for the danger of possible explosions.

  And the conclusions of the two apprentice journalists happened to be accurate.

  The experiments, not in chemistry but in physics, that Gasguin and his daughter were carrying out there, might, in fact, have proved very dangerous. On the other hand, at the École Normale or the Sorbonne, with the laboratory assistants and students of his official laboratory, or even the laboratories of those of his colleagues who would gladly have opened them up to him and solicited his collaboration, Gasguin feared awakening curiosity and “leaks”—thefts, in sum. If he had maintained a strict and grim silence since his third paper, it was not because that silence had been bought and obtained for favors rendered; it was to keep the secrets he had already conquered, and those whose conquest he sensed to be imminent, under wraps and inaccessible.