The Wing

by Jean Richepin

  But the next day, on meeting her father at the Gare Saint-Lazare, she had taken full possession of herself again, and mocked poor Yvernaux thus: “Were you really afraid, then? Reassure yourself, Godfather! It’s not that motor—yours—that I need. It’s over! I shan’t drink any more. I understand why Pascal was sober. Your flowers of rhetoric might benefit from that watering, but not our flowers of science. They have, as you put it, stems of steel and petal of...”

  She hesitated, as the image fled.

  “Don’t look for it,” her godfather said to her, cheerfully. “You won’t find anything, since you haven’t had an aperitif this morning. Besides which, you’re right; it’s not with those stimulants that you ought to wind up your head—your head adrift in the nebula of suns in formation. Leave the displaced state to old clowns like me, who merely prance around outside the tent in which you do your turns. Those who walk the high wire need their muscles, their equilibrium and their self-composure—so always keep clear, imperious and obedient that which represents your muscles, coordinating the regulatory movements and equilibrium of your brain—I mean your consciousness.”

  That day, once and never again, she had allowed her confidant to glimpse a tiny corner of her secret, by suddenly making him this confession: “The consciousness of my unconscious, then!” And she had added, in a low voice, between her teeth, a few inarticulate words, almost thought rather than spoken, that he had been unable to hear distinctly, but whose meaning he had guessed, and which he had translated, in his own language, as: “Because the genius, if there is any in this noggin, isn’t in the self of the O center but the polygonal self; except that, to collect the flowers of atavism and instinct therefrom, it requires the fingers of the expert flower-picker that is the voluntary intelligence—and even the flower-picker needs to be a conjurer.”

  On reflection, Yvernaux convinced himself that he had translated in the fashion of those translators who embellish a text, putting something of themselves into it. Indeed, Geneviève, interrogated on that interpretation of her thought, had become annoyed, accusing her godfather of exasperated—and exasperating—lyricism.

  “Oh, you always see otherworldly things in everything one says.”

  In reality, he had understood perfectly to begin with, and it was on reflection that he had made the mistake—or, rather, had been deceived.

  Why had Geneviève judged it appropriate to induce an error in this way? Doubtless driven automatically by an old ferment of “Romany” blood she had in her, as some of the people of Thiérache—a land of Bohemian alluvia—do. It is well known that members of that nomadic race, probably a survival of the most ancient humankind,14 are the most tenacious keepers of secrets in the world. Geneviève, who was distantly related to them, proved the dictum on this occasion.

  What she had wanted to achieve, in sum, through these fantasies, these trials, was an artificial means of capturing, with her conscious reason, the precious sources, rich in atavistic and instinctive treasures, that she sensed bubbling in the subterranean reservoirs of her most profound subconscious memory. But the example of her godfather had led her to mistrust herself with regard to the possible exploitation of these occult thaumaturgies. And since then, without ever letting her intimate preoccupations in that regard be suspected, she had searched in isolation, and had ended up finding specific practical applications of Professor Grasset’s theory of the superior and inferior psychic centers that were capable to bear fruit to her profit—or, rather, the profit of her father and his science.

  As she put gaiety into the most serious things, she sometimes thought: “Poor old Godfather! All the same, it’s not very nice of me to keep my polygonal self secret like this.”

  V

  Someone who could have said a great deal—perhaps more than anyone else in the world—about Geneviève and her strange gifts, and also about her ancestry, mingling that of Gasguin with the bizarre blood of the Hescheboix, ferlampiers and merlifiches,15 and about Thiérache in general and certain Thiérachian families in particular, and about many other things—of which no one, however, suspected that she had the least notion—was Aunt Aline.

  Although she did not have anything of the female scientist about her, seeming to be a good but humble and ignorant woman—which she was, in the strict sense of the word, since she did not even know how to read and write—Aunt Aline would have been instructive for more than one scientist, of the highest order. Professor Grasset, for one, could have obtained curious information from her, very precise observations and memories handed down from immemorial generations, relating to the inferiors psychic centers. It is not that she knew what those grand words signified, but of what lay beneath them, nothing of the substance escaped her—and of the most hermetic mysteries of atavism and instinct, she possessed, precisely by virtue of instinct and atavism, the shibboleth.

  Alas, to get to her to say anything, no matter how little, about all that she knew so fully and deeply, with such bright enlightenment, about these obscure matters, several unrealizable conditions would have had to be met.

  First of all, Aunt Aline the silent, when she took it into her head to talk, only spoke in short sentences uttered at distant intervals, as if surreptitiously. She mumbled these rare words, emitted avariciously, with seeming regret, as if desirous of taking them back as soon as they were uttered. And if one tried, having not quite heard them, to get her to repeat them, she shook her head in a sign of negation, and emphasized her refusal with a malign glance demonstrating that she was quite satisfied not to have been understood.

  It would have been necessary, too, for Aunt Aline actually to have thought what she had said. Now, she “felt” more that she thought, confusedly, but also in an intense fashion. That was visible, moreover, in the sudden pallor of her cheeks, in the furrowing of her perpendicularly-wrinkled forehead, in the bushy bar of her eyebrows, in the sealing of her lips like a purse closed over her toothless gums, and especially in her gaze, both flamboyant and heavy with meaning, in which sensation and thought were amalgamated with the incandescence of dense and ardent lava from the very center of inner being in eruption.

  It goes without saying that this explanatory image had Yvernaux for its author—who, at other times, also compared Aunt Aline’s eyes to very distant fires perceived in the mist—bivouac fires left by some fugitive merlifiche. Then he claimed to see there the last guttering sparks of fires by which the soul, many centuries ago, had been illuminated by some tribe wandering over the high plateaux of central Asia—which the old lady ought not to have understood, apparently, but to the story of which she nevertheless listened with delectation.

  “Well,” he said, “she’s an octogenarian! She’s entering a second childhood. The fairy tales with which she was rocked in the cradle, with which she has passed on, are coming back to mind. She thinks that story is one of them. Perhaps she imagines having known it exactly, and thus has the sensation of remembering it.”

  She had known it, in fact; that was what Yvernaux did not know. She really did remember them—the vagabonds’ fires on the high plateaux—without being precise as to whether or not they were in central Asia. And her memories, irreducible to photographic negatives from which prints might be obtained, but synthetically vivacious although incapable of expression in words, went back to an era far more remote than that of her childhood. She did not have, however—it is necessary to insist on this point—a perception of them, but a sensation, all the stronger for its very unconsciousness.

  Most of all, she did not analyze herself, never thinking of doing so, and would have been dead against the idea of anyone doing it for her. Even Geneviève, who adored her and was adored by her, had never had the vaguest inclination to do so. And yet, she was well aware of the prodigious heritage accumulated in the state of “uncommunicable knowledge” in Aunt Aline’s atavistic memory.

  For everyone else but Geneviève—for Gasguin especially, and often even for the penetrative and visionary Yvernaux—Aunt Aline was just a little
old woman, still active and alert, although, for two years now, an octogenarian. Neat and mousy, always occupied with some piece of needlework, uniformly clad in tight black garment, with nothing white about her but the protrusions of linen at her collar and the ends of her sleeves, and the hair beneath her mourning-dress bonnet, she had the gleam, the clarity, the color and also the mannerisms of a scarab beetle. She also seemed to have the dryness and the argumentative humor of one, and would gladly, as we have seen, practiced its verbal mutism, contenting herself with communicating in gestures, since, even when rare brief sentences escaped her, she crushed them between her gums—expressly, one might have thought, to render the unrecognizable and unintelligible.

  In any case, the things she expressed in that fashion were doubtless of no great interest; and that is why, attaching no importance to them, she did not require anyone to pay any heed to them. Such was, at least, the reason furnished by Thibaud Gasguin to explain Aunt Aline’s habitual silences and premeditated mumbling. For—without a trace of malice—he considered her as a creature of a very ordinary intellectual category, almost a simpleton, endowed with all the honest mediocre qualities that make a perfect housekeeper: not so much a good housewife as a model servant, in his estimation.

  To tell the truth, he had never known her, and certainly not studied her, in any other appearance, and in the more than sixty years she had lived in the same house—save for rare intervals, the longest of which had been his time in the seminary—he had never had occasion to taken the trouble to look into her. For as long as he could remember, she had always seemed the same, just as simple and just as enclosed in her black scarab carapace, uniquely made for the work of a Cinderella, never emerging therefrom and not suffering in consequence. It took him an instant of reflection to observe that she had grown old. Although he did not think of computing the time elapsed since his childhood, it seemed to him that could still find her there, in the process of caring for him, he being a child and she already a woman. He needed to make an effort to remember her young rather than imagine her in that fashion, when he had been very small and she had already been nearing thirty. The extra half-century and more that she had aged today, he had always put on her forehead, where he would have sworn that he had never seen any but white hairs. In reality, for him, she had no age at all.

  It was in exactly the same way that he attributed a personality to her. She was an integral part of him, difficult to distinguish from his own self. Aline was like an indispensable limb—and he showed her no more gratitude than one testifies to one’s arm or one’s leg, or any other organ. She was his housekeeping organ.

  He had only been a few hours old when she had become that, exclusively, having replaced, with respect to the orphaned Thibaud, the mother stolen by a attack of eclampsia after having delivered him into the world. One could even say that her caring for Thibaud had begun before he was born, for it was Aline who had been the nurse—how attentive and zealous!—of her sister Idalie, whose pregnancy, which was her second, had developed in particularly bad conditions.

  If one had been able to read what was in the utmost and most secret depths of Aunt Aline, one would have learned one thing there that she scarcely admitted to herself, without being wholly certain of it: that she had already watched over Thibaud for a very long time, before the pregnancy, when he had still been—as the philosopher Yvernaux put it—among “future contingencies” for Aline, that bizarre and abnormal creature possessed a gift of obscure prescience, of which several proofs had already been given in the history of the Gasguin family.

  Thus, it was in prevision of the Thibaud to come, and especially of Geneviève to be born of him—all without exact names or clear designations, of course—that Aline had acted, under automatic pressure and instinctive suggestion, to marry her younger sister, Idalie Hescheboix, to François Gasguin. For it was really her, simple Aline, the quasi-mute, the humble servant—one of those who, in Thiérache, are said to “overdo things”—of the Gasguin family, who had made the marriage by her manipulations.

  And the task had not progressed of its own accord; it had required cunning and eloquence, if not in the words with which Aline was scarcely skilled, at least in her actions, in which she had shown an innate experience that one might have thought—and which really had been—accumulated by innumerable generations of horse-traders. How many steps to take and overtures to make, traps to set and others to avoid, hazards to render favorable and obstacles to change into supports, it had required to succeed, as Aline had done in two assiduous years of patience and science, in marrying Idalie, the poor merligaudière (merligodgière, in Thiérachian) of Pré-Pourri,16 to the only son of the Gasguins, the richest farmers of the richest land in Buire!

  Undoubtedly, there was one trump card in Aline’s hand—her sister’s resplendent beauty. That was, however, only a winning card in appearance, for it was mistrusted and could not be led. Prudent families know only too well what the beauty of a merligodgière represents: an inclination to idleness; an appetite for fast living and costly frippery; ruinous expenses; and eventual bankruptcy. On the other hand, for gallants who are smitten regardless, there is the notoriety that the commodity in question does not ordinarily pay in the currency of marital bliss.

  The supposed high card of Idalie’s beauty was, therefore, perhaps a false high card, and in any case, how many low cards there were alongside it in Aline’s hand! Firstly, the poverty, or, to put it better—meaning worse—the disastrous pennilessness of the Hescheboix. Disastrous without giving rise to pity, alas! For Père and Mère Hescheboix, once not-unprosperous sellers of farm produce, then petty general traders and still good earners, had fallen by their own fault—their idleness, their slovenliness, their drunkenness—into the quasi-beggardom to which they had now been reduced, living in a half-demolished building, the remains of the old collapsed mill of Pré-Pourri. What work did they do there? The question was asked but unanswered. So-called second-hand dealers, rabbit-skin merchants, basket-weavers, mole-catchers, rat-poisoners and informers, they lived primarily by poaching and smuggling, less as bold operators to their own account as vile receivers and intermediaries.

  No one, even among the most modest “sod-busters” had any desire to get involved with such people, to the extent of marriage. One can imagine what the Gasguins, honorable among the “swells” of the region and proud of a fortune that would not be shared out, reverting to their only son, would have thought. The idea never even crossed their minds. It would have passed for a sudden fit of madness, at which they would have laughed wholeheartedly, as they laughed at hoaxes, absurdities and the fashionable couplets, in the mode of the strolling players of old, hawked around by Père Hescheboix—whom they would rather not have made up a song based on an old Thiérachian saying about their land of Buire, the mocking refrain which he would come to squawk at them when he was drunk, in the guise of an appeal for alms, in the old Picard patois:

  The people of Buire are red-faced folk

  With fiery eyes who live in hovels.

  Buire in France, fifty leagues from Paris:

  Twelve houses, thirteen wells, fifteen thieves!17

  Certainly, they were amused by them, the rich and all-powerful Gasguins, perched so high and far above those paupers, whom they did not even do the honor of fearing, or even holding them in scorn—the scorn of a Gasguin being too precious an ammunition to waste on poor sparrows like those merligodgiers, merlifiches and ferlampiers. It is relevant that, pitying the Hescheboix because they had once known joyful prosperity, and pitying them in spite of their vices and their merited discomfort, the Gasguins had no hesitation in giving the miserable family the hospitality of the building in Pré-Pourri, which they had bought for almost nothing along with the abandoned mill-pond. They had done even more, taking into service with them the elder daughter Aline—who, by an extraordinary contradiction with her environment of sloth and excess, turned out to be the silent and active being we know.

  Oh yes, active! Bett
er than that, and more so than the Gasguins were able to observe in the “overdoing” of her vulgar tasks. That Cinderella was as active in mind as she was with her hands, and more so, even though she appeared to be as mindless as she was poor—as poor as her unfortunate parents were in everything, especially in virtue. Active she was for two full years, dreaming, wanting, preparing, manipulating and finally accomplishing that unexpected marriage between the rich François Gasguin, whom she coaxed on her sister’s behalf, and her sister Idalie, whom she adored!

  And all that, once again, without a plan fixed in advance, without any expressed idea, but with an unconscious meditation and the prescience—there is no other word for it—of an instinct working toward a birth in which an entire race had to end and flower.

  Thus proceed certain insects of the family of digger wasps, such as those of the genera Sphex and Cerceris, whose perfect anatomical knowledge and impeccable surgical dexterity have been brought to light by the brilliant observations of the great naturalist Henri Fabre, the hermit of Sérignan. These sharp operators deliberately paralyze the living prey on which their larvae will nourish themselves. They, who live on the nectar of flowers, prepare the pasture of lethargic flesh, and dose that lethargy according to the needs of the growth that their larvae must undertake. These fabricators of the species to come, different from themselves, commit no sin in the complicated and difficult preparation of that mysterious genesis, for which they work in complete darkness, without any other knowledge of their certain progeniture but the impulsion of their maternal instinct, blind and automatic, rich in secrets accumulated by an immemorial heredity.

  Thus, blindly but surely, Aline had proceeded, first in marrying her sister Idalie to François Gasguin, then in raising Thibaud Gasguin after Idalie’s death, and finally in becoming Gasguin’s servant throughout his entire life, all in order that the larva might be born, and find appropriate pasture, that would one day be her beloved Geneviève.