The Wing

by Jean Richepin

  Straight away, on arriving in Parisian society after leaving his native province, he had scented beasts of prey lying in ambush everywhere, including some under the cover of the most noble professions. Seduced by the initial caresses made to his glory, all the softer because the sometimes came from the manifestly envious, he had resisted the subtle temptation to surrender his secrets. His ancient peasant ancestry, of Thiérachian caution, had put him on his guard against those who, according to the old Thiérachian saying, knew how to tickle a goose’s belly in order to steal its down more easily.

  Immediately sobered from the fumes of success, he had resumed the modest air of a provincial professional, attributing his discoveries to the fortunate hazards of chance, finding himself overwhelmed by the rewards that had been their fruit—and he willingly declared that his destiny was now complete.

  Faith was easily lent to these affirmations, firstly because they calmed the anxious envy of rivals, and secondly because the former seminarian that Gasguin, in fact, was, had conserved from his preparatory exercises for the priesthood a persuasive unction and all the meek appearances of Christian humility.

  People had, therefore, soon got used to seeing the fellow he now seemed to be as a person who ought not to inspire any ambitious dread, a wise friend of mediocrity, whose blissfully satisfied physiognomy he displayed. And it was without hypocrisy, moreover, that he played that character; deep down, by nature, that was what he was.

  And yet, a real and ardent ambitious thirst devoured him, born of the unexpected kiss that glory had given him. Put on the track of formidable results rendered possible by discoveries already made, and especially by future conclusions already in view and experiments in progress, his hopes were incubating monstrous eggs. He was sometimes disturbed and bowled over by them himself, like a hen with the presentiment, even the prescience, of chicks destined to become lightning-bearing eagles.

  That accuracy of that comparison, due to Blaise Yvernaux, by which Gasguin was haunted, could not have been grasped, nor its profundity comprehended, by anyone except Yvernaux, everyone except the two of them being ignorant of the role played by Geneviève in her father’s life, and especially his work. But it was also because Gasguin knew it himself, and on the advice of Yvernaux, and according to the formal and absolute desire of Geneviève, that the work consecutive to Gasguin’s first three memoirs was being carried out in the private laboratory at the far end of Vaugirard.

  In sum, Thibaud Gasguin really was a petty professor of physics, an excellent teacher, a perfect assimilator and propagator of knowledge received from others and communicated to others—and he was, in addition, a skillful experimenter, with a strictly logical mind, patient, orderly and methodical. Left to himself, though, he would indeed have merited languishing in an obscure chair until his retirement. And Blaise Yvernaux was right when he melted in ecstasy and cries of admiration before Geneviève’s genius, because the three papers that Thibaud Gasguin had written and published were Geneviève’s ideas.

  Nevertheless, genius is like madness, essentially contagious, in the nervous sense of the word, if it can have such a sense. Thus, Gasguin alone would have remained an honest physicist and nothing more, but, illuminated by his daughter, he had become her reflection—the moon of that sun, as Yvernaux put it. In consequence, the halo of that splendor also ringed his head.

  Whence came, when the couple passed by, the wake of effluvia that made the hair of sensitive individuals bristle.

  IV

  It was in perfectly good faith that Geneviève refused the homages of her godfather and politely accused him of stupidity when he caused offense with one of his formularistic litanies. And it was in all sincerity, too, that she was astonished by the seemingly-startled expressions of admiration that her father sometimes assumed—like an imperial mantle, Yvernaux said.

  Then, she exclaimed: “Well, what? What’s the matter with you, Father, looking at me devotedly like that, as if I were the holy sacrament?”

  “It’s because you are, to me, at the moment,” he replied.

  “Why, and for what reason?” she demanded.

  And when Thibaud Gasguin questioned her about some hypothesis she had just formulated, about some extravagant association of ideas, about the absolutely unexpected and paradoxical conclusion drawn from an experiment, she started to laugh, understanding that the trivial item in question, thrown out almost at hazard, had triggered such a profound surge of ecstasy in her father’s ever-religious soul.

  “Truly,” she said, one day, “it wouldn’t take much for you to become once again the priest that you once nearly...”

  “That I still am,” Gasguin interrupted, swiftly, “and that I shall never cease to be before miracles as astounding as that.”

  That day, Geneviève had simply said to him, with regard to a problem of gravitational attraction that he had found it difficult to solve, translated into equivalents of motive force. “Isn’t it funny? Scarcely had you pronounced your number than I saw it transposed to another planet—or to the Earth turning on its axis seventeen times more rapidly—and then it became false at the equator, the centrifugal force suddenly equaling the centripetal, and weight no longer existing.”

  At which he had smiled at first, having been familiar with that pons asinorum of astronomical physics for a long time—but after which he smile had frozen in amazement, Geneviève having continued thus:

  “I repeat that I can see the figure transposed—alive and active, you understand—and that I can see”—she emphasized the word forcefully—“driven thereby, the engine we’ve been seeking to equilibrate the...”

  And she had fallen silent abruptly before her father’s face, rapt with adoration, and had laughed, breaking the charm, in order to remind him of the “failed” priest that he was.

  And again, on Gasguin’s interruption, reiterating his act of devotional faith and talking about miracles such as that one, she had been unable to turning her nose up mockingly and saying: “What miracle, then, has knocked the breath right out of you?”

  The silliness of the Thiérachien expression did not succeed in clearing Gasguin’s hallucinated face. His bloodless lips were muttering, as if in prayer: “The miracle is that I too have see either figure transposed, alive, active, driving the engine. I saw it when you saw it. And if you had not suddenly burst out laughing, you would have fixed that figure within me. There’s the miracle! And you often work miracles of that magnitude. And when they take effect in my brain, that when I draw out the light of which our glory, of which your glory, which people believe to be mine...”

  “But it’s absolutely yours, Father dear—yours, undoubtedly yours—never doubt that!” And the violence of her protest concluded with a big and tender hug, in which she expressed all her loyal and sincere abnegation relative to him, without any jealousy, without the shadow of an afterthought reserving anything whatsoever for herself. For it was in good faith, more than ever, that she attributed the preponderant and the essential part of their discoveries to her father.

  To be sure, she took good account of the unexpected, rare and quasi-divinatory element that she brought to it, and she appreciated the full range of these strange godsends, which Blaise Yvernaux called—bizarrely, but quite accurately—“hypothetical flashes, serving as point of support in the void for the screw of rationality, whose spiral ends in a new law”. That Thibaud Gasguin had often profited from these flashes to travel by their light alongside-roads leading to unexplored regions of science she gladly admitted, and thus took a legitimate pride in saying that she had sometimes shortened, or even signposted, the route. Nevertheless, she remained convinced that he could have got there without her help, that he did not have any absolute need for her, that she had simply rendered his work more original and more amusing, and that, in the final analysis, he would have achieved, albeit more slowly, results that were just as good without her, whereas she would never have got anywhere without him. And that, she believed, fully and firmly.

>   The reason for such utterly sincere modesty was the observation of the scant effort that these so-called miracles cost her, especially when she compared that ease to the hard labor of Thibaud Gasguin, and that which she had undertaken in order to assimilate the present-day scientific encyclopedia.

  Contrary to Yvernaux’s opinion, she would not have conquered all the diplomas at the drop of a hat or passed the doctoral examinations with the certainty of first place. It had required a great deal of time and difficulty, and long nights, and recommencements after failed attempts, and the employment of all her energy, all her capacity for work and all her most fervent zeal “simply to store in her brain,” as her godfather put it, some of the innumerable sheaves harvested by so many geniuses in the vast domain of science. Merely in holding and arranging there, in that feminine brain, the substance of various diplomas and doctorates in mathematics, physics and chemistry, she had used up her adolescence, then her youth, and then the first spring of her womanhood—and thus had coiffed Saint Catherine without being aware of it.

  All of that, moreover, she had learned from her father, an excellent teacher whose reliable information had been made even more careful, attentive and penetrating for her than for his other pupils. Thus, she had retained an affectionate gratitude, and also an admiring respect, for the facility he showed in teaching that which she had sometimes found so hard to learn.

  By way of compensation, in the species of scientific vision for which her father, her former master, suddenly astonished, and then admired her—those hypothetical flashes with regard to which her godfather did not spare lyrical images—Geneviève took no pride, finding no difficulty at all in producing them, and hence not the slightest merit. It was in vain that Blaise Yvernaux tried to make her sense their extraordinary value; she would not consent to see anything extraordinary in them, but only the foliage of swarming metaphors that he plucked.

  “What!” he cried. “You mistake for bottle-ends those lenses of rotating lighthouses, whose jets of multicolored fire set the four corners of the horizon in flower in a matter of seconds! And you don’t detect something akin to an intellectual seismic shock in the depths of your being when you release those words, whose hectowatt power makes an entire field of physics tremble! And you don’t even blink in launching the spark of a gaze that plunges into the deepest darkness of what the navigators of old called coal-sacks in the sky? And you want us to believe that you’re not even conscious of...”

  “Of course,” she often interjected, “I’m not conscious of this, or that, and especially of all the beautiful rhetoric with which you dazzle me, godfather! Since I’ve told you a thousand times that the sole discoverer of these lighthouse beams, these electrical discharges, these plumb-lines cast into infinity—or, at least, what you baptize with these wondrous names—is my unconscious, my subconscious.”

  “Yes, yes, understood,” Yvernaux replied. “You’ve pinned back my ears enough with your pretension on to have genius in your polygonal centers, as Grasset puts it.12 But I contend that your O centre is perfectly up-to-date with what’s happening in your polygon, and I affirm, moreover, that true genius consists precisely in that conscious exploitation of the unconscious, which means that...”

  “Oh, Godfather, no!” she generally concluded. “Mercy! Psychology and me, you know…!”

  And she pretended irreverently to take her head in her two hands in order not to hear any more. All the same, she was not unaware of that famous and interesting theory of the superior and inferior psychic centers, to which the great vitalist doctor of Montpellier has given the original schema of the polygon and the O point. None of the significance of that symbolic schema escaped her. She distinguished quite clearly within herself between her conscious, voluntaristic self and her pologyonal—which is to say, atavistic, instinctive, passionate and automatic—self. She had even drawn some special practices from the theory, which might perhaps have caused Dr. Grasset some surprise, but she did not let their secret filter out, especially to her godfather, confident of her more extravagant fantasies.

  For she had sometimes had fantasies, and sometimes truly extravagant ones, that x-head, apparently so wise, that old-young woman with the colorless face, whose nun-like appearance called for a frontal band and the shadow of a cornette. Yvernaux could not think of those fantasies without shivering, still in the retrospective fear of the singular parentheses opened thereby in the life of that lay saint.

  Had he not been obliged, one day, to bring his goddaughter an apparatus for smoking opium, with the “instructions for use,” for which he had asked one of his comrades, a naval officer returned from Tonkin? Otherwise—she had affirmed in a certain authoritarian tone that she occasionally adopted, and why admitted no reply—she would set out herself in search of an opium-den, which she knew to exist in the vicinity of the Arc de Triomphe, and would go into it without further ado. For fear of that worse alternative, he had yielded to her evil desire, and with his complicity, therefore, she had smoked opium for nearly three months.

  Another time, it was hashish that she wanted to try, and he had similarly obeyed—not without trying to scare her, however, with the possible and terrible consequences of those stimulants, which quickly became narcotics.

  To which she had replied, with a mocking wink and an enigmatic smile: “Do you imagine, then, that my brain needs stimulants? On the contrary!”

  And some time after that, when he recalled that bizarre reply, of which he had not yet grasped the “on the contrary,” she said to him point-blank: “Well, yes, so what? What my brain thirsts for, on occasion, is stupefaction. That’s how I interpret Pascal’s advice to ‘brutalize yourself!’”13 Then, with all the seriousness in the world, with her expression of child-like ingenuousness, she added: “Didn’t he drink, Pascal?”

  He laughed out loud, hands on hips, at the idea of Pascal as a drunkard. “You’re crazy!”

  “I’ll give you the proof that I’m not,” she said, coldly. “Once, you called me Pascal cubed, didn’t you? We’ll square that cube, if you like—and if even if you don’t.”

  He listened, bewildered and uncomprehending. He thought she was ill, irrational. Still very serious and no less ingenuous, she continued: “You don’t follow? It’s quite simple, though. I intend to show you Pascal cubed and drunk.”

  And she had demanded that he enable her to drink those famous aperitifs of which he had so often and so bravely lauded the charms—for he was not ashamed of his vice and gave the only excuses for it that he thought worthwhile, of knowing the joys, comforts and hopes to be found therein. Today, more prudent because he was over fifty—having passed that landmark ten or twelve years before—he limited himself to beer and wine to put himself in the displaced state, and no longer used, except in miserly and widely-spaced sessions, the divine openers of paradise, as he called them. Once, he had owed his most beautiful flights to chimerical Eldorados to them.

  “It’s true,” he said “that it finishes up by spoiling them for you, by virtue of having seen them in dreams—but what dreams!”

  “I want to know, therefore, those that a drunken Pascal would have had.”

  Thus had she decreed, still with the same sort of threat, swearing that if her godfather did not procure her the famous bitters, angostura and Pernod at home, she would go to drink them elsewhere, cynically, in some café in the Latin Quarter, where she would make a spectacle of her drunkenness—too bad!

  With the result that poor Yvernaux had successively enabled her to taste, methodically graduating the doses and the effects, first light vermouth, in which the innocence of distilled white wine is tainted with a perverse dose of the subtle pharmacopeia of angostura; then bitters, whose poisonous blackness corrodes the metal of counters and also that of the will, but volatilizes your soul among light dancing vapors; and finally the magical absinthe, flowering with all the herbs of the Sabbat, the breath of aniseed and star anise: the absinthe that water, dribbled in pearls or poured in a cataract, decomposes
prismatically, and then becomes a molten opal, liquid, cool and burning, like a mouth that blossoms and vanishes in a kiss of frozen fire; the miraculous absinthe, both slave and tyrant, that causes you to see works yet to be attempted completed, and prevents you from starting them, which suppresses effort toward goals by placing them at the end of a barely-sketched gesture; that leads you the worst discomforts with a smile of triumphant pride, provided that you no longer cease to regard the word as rose-tinted through its green eyes; the absinthe that has for its final phase, after the repositories of glory and apotheosis, the total annihilation of all sentiment, and even of all sensation, in the unconscious bliss of paralysis.

  That Geneviève should never allow herself to go so far, Yverdon was quite certain, since he had been able to stop on the slippery slope in time, before arriving at the final gulf. He had been no less terrified for her, of seeing her, for nearly a month, acquire a taste for twice-daily absinthism, albeit without overmuch abuse: for the habitual smiling and happy semi-daze that it provides, idle in deed, active in speech and supersaturated with projects, dreams ready to be realized, hopes that one can almost hold in one’s hand, like a picked fruit.

  Thibaud Gasguin having been away that month, on a scientific mission to the United States, Yvernaux had been able to conceal from him Geneviève’s complete idleness during those four weeks in which she had abandoned all work—but it was a close-run thing! On the very eve of the day when her father was due to return, Geneviève had said: “This time, I think I’ve found the true cerebral motor. Yours, at any rate, Godfather, for I perceive that the displaced state is really your state of inspiration.”