The Wing

by Jean Richepin

  For everything that was good, precious, powerful, gentle and strong in the present or future descendants of the family, Aunt Aline invariable attributed to her former idol, the flower of the blood of the Hescheboix, to the one from whom the flower of the flower of that blood would one day be born, to her Idalie, whom she had called during their childhood and youth, until the hour preceding her death “my Idalie, my lovely sister, my little God!”

  And, chancing to be in a vein of slightly less brief utterances, she reminded the new priest of that—and Abbé Denis proved, moreover, that he would soon be the fine recruit anticipated by his director, for the idolatrous, quasi-sacrilegious expression did not scandalize him at all. Thibaud had frowned anxiously, on behalf of the Abbé freshly emerged from the mold of ordination, but the future Jesuit Father had smiled indulgently, and the two brothers and Aunt Aline had savored a collective delight, the first two in having heard again and the last-named in repeating, as if in ecstasy: “My Idalie, my lovely sister, my little God!”

  Less profane than that day’s joy, but almost more agreeable still, and undoubtedly the second best, had been the reappearance in Thibaud’s life, in which he had previously played such an important role: Blaise Yvernaux, another dead man suddenly returned to life.

  Even Aunt Aline, who had separated from him on a sour note, did not see him again without a sentiment of pleasure—quite simply, at first, because she retained, beneath the layer of the final memories, a substratum of older and more favorable memories. Was he not the one who had contrived to remove Thibaud’s soutane? And who, with his eloquence, had brought him to white heat in order that Aline might forge him according to the new shape demanded by destiny? And who else but him could have professed that perennial fine faith in Thibaud’s future, that faith from which the good seminarian, the prudent Thiérachian, had extracted the audacity necessary to hurl himself into the adventure?

  In memory of and in loyal gratitude for all that, Aunt Aline had therefore taken satisfaction from the knowledge of a possible imminent return into their lives—but what she rejoiced in especially was the idea, or rather the sensation, that the event of his return would be the forerunner of other, more important events to the advantage of something obscure for which she was waiting. What that thing was, she could not have said, any more today than on the day of the separation; that the thing in question was nevertheless en route toward them, she sensed.

  Without adding anything more precise, she had not been able to help saying to Gasguin, when he had received the letter from Yvernaux making an appeal to their old friendship: “I was sure, my son, that we’d see one another again.” And as the words of yore rose up to her teeth again, she chewed some of them over again, among them a pronouncement whose prophetic quality was manifest:

  “Almost an entire week and a half of years without seeing one another...”

  Which Thibaud, not having paid any heed to it before, or no longer remembering it, did not understand; otherwise, he would have been amazed, in calculating that ten years had indeed already elapsed between the departure from Paris and Yvernaux’s letter. Ten years—which is to say, seven years plus three years, and not more three years and six months, but exactly three years and five months; in brief, what Aline had called, in her bizarre language, “almost an entire week and a half of years.”

  In any case, Gasguin was certainly in no state to notice such “Chinese puzzles of hazard,” as he would not have failed to describe it if he had heard it. Yvernaux’s letter gave him other interesting information, and he had reached a critical junction himself the day before, which he considered to be definitive.

  He had gone, in fact, for the second time, and with the firm resolution that it would be the last, to take the examination for admission to the doctorate. Since his first failure, five years earlier, in a period of his career when he really had not had the material and intellectual means to prepare for that redoubtable contest, he had sworn not to go into battle again until he had every chance of victory. Thanks to his increased salary, the purchase of books and instruments, and the proximity of a Faculty of Sciences, where he had devoted himself, as if under pressure, to study, in order to catch up with the most recent theories and discoveries, he was as formidably armed now as it was possible to be—and if he did not end in triumph this time, it was because he was condemned to defeat without appeal. In sum, he went into it with a clear conscience—and one can imagine the state of excitement to which he was prey.

  This, in addition, is what he learned from Yvernaux’s long and dithyrambic letter, here filtered and summarized as briefly as possible, without entirely obliterating its bouquet:

  After a further five or six years of bohemian existence in the Quarter, of furious swinishness alternating with seasons of mellow idleness, Blaise had chanced to come into an unexpected inheritance assuring him, not of a fortune, but an honest ease: the famous aurea mediocritas25 of the Latin poet; for a thousand francs a year. He had taken advantage of it to “turn over a new leaf,” to immerse himself once again in the healthy springs of work and ambition, and, according to the Thiérachian expression “to get hold of the horse’s mane again”—on the Pegasus of Glory, he added, in parentheses. He had determined to pass his examinations and become a great thinker. He had failed the doctorate in philosophy, still “by the fault of Sorbonnards shocked by the audacity of his theories and the lyricism of his language.” He was too “mythic” for those “misfits”—one can imagine him proclaiming that. All the same, they had been forced to lower their flag (an old night-shirt, he emphasized) before his (a triumphant horn, he emphasized immediately, underlining it three times) and, after a prestigious defense—before which the simulated-bronze bonzes had melted in admiration, to the applause of a “roomful of brains,” if he might express it thus—Blaise Yvernaux had received his doctorate of letters, on the very eve of the day on which he was writing, and earned it with two theses “destined to last,” two works “marking a crucial date in the annals of Ideas”: his Latin thesis De calignosi Heracliti ad illustrandum Enti et Nihili essentiam sicut eamdem fulguribus quibusdam,26 which he described as being Spinoza reviewed by Hegel and written by Seneca; and his French thesis, of which the title alone, The Metaphysics of the Absurd, was, he affirmed, undeniably the Open Sesame of all mysteries.

  What a delight it was for Thibaud thus to rediscover his “brilliant” Yvernaux of old, an honest man again, finally having assumed the rank in the world that he had occupied in the seminary—and just at the moment when he was about to set the seal on his ten years of labor by his triumph in the doctoral examination! For Blaise’s success appeared to him to be an omen of his own. Together they had set out and together they would arrive.

  And in that conviction of a hope suddenly ripened into a near-certainty, it was with assurance that he took the train for Paris, crowning his ten years of patient effort with that final surge of self-confidence—for which reason Aunt Aline was again sincerely grateful for Yverdon’s reappearance. Had not her Thibaud, rendered lyrical with joy, said to her:

  “Don’t you think that his fiery letter is like a comet announcing for this year a vintage of memorable happiness?”

  X

  It is unfortunate that Yvernaux never found out about that extraordinary fit of lyricism on the part of his Gasguin. He would have taken it as a license to preach in favor of his beloved lyricism by saying: “You see how good it is! The one time that you were lyrical, you went as far as being a prophet.”

  It was not only for the present year, in fact, but for the entire series of years from then on, it seemed, that the comet had promised prosperous vintages, From then on, Gasguin’s life had not ceased to be fortunate—even, as we shall see, in the few side-roads by which fate attempted to deflect him, only succeeding in further ensuring his good progress.

  There was, to begin with, the famous doctoral examination—passed in the end, it goes without saying, and in honorable conditions, the competition having been particular
ly strong, but passed nevertheless, if much less triumphantly than Gasguin’s momentary lyricism had desired. That cruel disappointment was, however, without his suspecting it, good for him.

  Too brilliantly received, and immediately set above his peers thanks to the aureole of the competition, he would probably have been immediately marked down for a chair in Paris. Now, that “immediately” would have been “too soon.” Only Aunt Aline suspected that, we must assume, for, on learning that Thibaud, instead of the desired first place of which he had been almost certain, had scraped into the next-to-last, she told him, when he became indignant, gazing at him vaguely but fixedly: “It’s better this way, my son.”

  And when he ground his teeth, she added one of her favorite old sayings: “To the Gasguins, patience brings profit.”

  Whether she had said that blindly or not, to console her son for his quasi-defeat or with the real apprehension of a Parisian “immediately” turning out to be a “too soon,” it remains the case that by that nomination—which is to say, by excessive success in the competition—the future of which she had the occult care would have been lost. That is what no one suspected, not even Gasguin, who turned his back on her resentfully that day, concluding that she really was a little too stupid sometimes.

  Almost an idiot—who knows?

  To which, as if he had spoken the sentence aloud, she replied: “It’s in the province that you ought to marry.”

  Never before had she made any allusion to the idea of marriage. Nor had Gasguin. Celibacy had remained dear to him, as if he were still awaiting the priesthood. From his adolescence in the seminary he had retained an absolute appetite for chastity, and had felt it increase rather than decrease in assiduous work and carnal solitude. In reality, amorous sentiment had not even needed to be extinguished within him, nothing ever having set it alight. It was a seed within his being, atrophied and, worse still, absent. So Aunt Aline’s bizarre affirmation made him burst out laughing.

  He laughed again, on his own, that evening, when he related the strange occurrence to Yvernaux, in a letter in which he announced his doctorate.

  “If I’d had the luck,” he wrote, “to run into you in Paris, incorrigible Thiérachian that you are, I’d have invited you here to spend the rest of the vacation with us; but I don’t regret it too much, for you’d have found an Aunt Aline almost fallen into infantilism, although she’s only just a quinquegenarian. Can you imagine that she’s now got it into her head to marry me off? No. Can you see me in the power of a woman—me, a defrocked seminarian, a failed curé, henceforth devoted to a new priesthood, more demanding than the other: that of Science? Can you see me…?”

  And, perhaps hilarious for the first time in his life, he continued in that tone, almost jokingly, while laughing out loud—with the result that Aunt Aline arrived, anxiously running to his rescue, imagining that he had, as she said “swallowed his saliva the wrong way.”

  Three days later, he received Yvernaux’s rely, and collapsed in surprise on reading it. The former bohemian of the Quarter, the maker of speeches laden with panache and the animated ironist, had retracted all the claws of his irony and all the ruffled plumage of his metaphors, and spread wise counsel like butter, advising Thibaud to allow himself to be married off by Aunt Aline.

  “Just as I’ve turned over a new leaf,” he wrote, “you need to turn over one. And for you, that consists of matrimonial calm. A scientist, a university man, needs a family. With your doctorate, and your bread on the board, and your retirement in prospect, you ought, indeed...”

  And Yvernaux sermonized thus for ten pages running—not because he was much changed, as Gasguin thought, but because he knew the essential bourgeois that his friend was, and loved him as such, and wanted him to be happy, with the happiness designed for people like him. A hint of egotism was mingled with that desire, naturally; Yvernaux knew that he was destined himself for adventure, in spite of everything—at least intellectually—and he was not averse to preparing for his old age, as a philosopher still bohemian in spirit, a refuge of stable and familial tranquility.

  “I shall be content,” he wrote, in all naivety, “to see your children and be their godfather.”

  Gasguin fell off his perch. What! Everyone, then, had abandoned him. He grew sad. He experienced a sort of reversion to the distant and vague religious appetency of his youth and regretted the ecclesiastical peace in which he might have had the leisure to cultivate the sciences conjointly with his divine service. And he wrote a long letter on that subject to his brother, Abbé Denis, the only person in whom he thought he would encounter a heart sympathetic to his exclusive desire for celibacy.

  The prompt response was a thunderbolt. The Abbé informed him of his imminent visit, precisely to discuss with him the subject of a marriage that he had in mind for him.

  And that marriage was made, all the people dear to Thibaud wanting it. He too, finally persuaded that it was for the best, wanted it. After the objections that he had been the first, and the only one, to raise against the universal desire that was soon to become his own, his fate had been brought back to the true path by the second happiness of his life, even sweeter than the doctorate: an exquisite union.

  Not that Gasguin was obliged thereby to experience and savor the joys—especially the sensualities of amour—for which he decidedly seemed not to have been made, at least until then. But he found therein what Aunt Aline, in spite of her qualities as a perfect housekeeper and the great affection of a devoted servant, could not offer him: an assiduous companion, an intelligence capable of associating itself with the work that he loved.

  To tell the truth, Mademoiselle Anne-Herminie-Luce de Saint-Ylan would scarcely have seemed espousable by anyone except Gasguin, so energetically persuaded by his brother Abbé Denis, the insistent letters of Yvernaux, the silent but stubborn objurgations of Aunt Aline, and by himself, convinced now that he ought to provide himself with a household. It needed no less than that to prevent him from observing that his intended was neither pretty, nor young, nor equipped, in spite of these deficits, with anything that might excuse them under the pretext of a god bargain.

  Eighteen hundred francs of income for life was not sufficient, in fact, to dazzle a professor with a doctorate, with a minimum annual income of 3600 francs, with an assured pension. And even if he had had the hypnotized eyes of a pauper, that would have been unable to make him forget that Mademoiselle Anne-Herminie-Luce de Saint-Ylan was 35 years old—five years older than Thibaud—and that she evoked the idea of a caricature rather than that of a feminine face, with her overly long nose, her overly high forehead, a mouth like the slot in a money-box, the vitreous eyes of a dead fish, and the meager vermicelli of her hair stuck to her hollow temples.

  And yet, Thibaud had not found fault either with the dowry, which seemed to him magnificent, being constituted as an income, nor her age, to which he did not attach any importance, having manipulated numbers so extensively in mathematics that he always attributed an abstract and absolute character to them. As for her physiognomy, he had been quite satisfied to have noticed excitedly, during their first meeting, that her mask—he took the word literally, as we shall see—bore an extraordinary resemblance to the death-mask of Blaise Pascal.

  To be sure, he entered into it complacently, his vision blinded, not by love, but by passive obedience to the suggestions to which he was prey. For Mademoiselle Saint-Ylan’s visage lacked exactly that which rendered the other splendid and miraculously alive in the mould of death: it lacked thought, ready to reignite in the vitreous eyes sealed beneath the eyelids and vibrant still as a sublime arrow in the bow of the lips, vainly compressed, it seemed, by the plaster that it was about to burst asunder in an explosion of genius. But that was all that Gasguin saw, so profound was his adoration for Pascal. Thus, at the first stroke, through that admiration and his passion for science, he had loved, as much as was possible for him, the woman offered to him as a spouse.

  Why did the Comtesse want to find a husb
and for Mademoiselle de Saint-Ylan? Firstly, by virtue of what adventures did the Comtesse have a foster-sister with a particule?27 What, that is to say, had led to a gentleman—the Saint-Ylans were authentic Breton squires—espousing a nurse, a simple Pontual gamekeeper’s daughter? And how exactly, in seeking a husband who might suit Anne-Herminie-Luce, had Thibaud Gasguin been sniffed out?

  That, in truth, would be too long a story, since it would involve another whole history much thicker with confusion than the present one. Anyway, the details of it would be of purely romantic interest; those concerning the family, life and character of Thibaud Gasguin and a few others at least have the excuse for their perhaps excessive abundance of being necessary to a knowledge of Geneviève.

  Without having the pretension to reconstitute here—to employ grandiose terms—the exegesis and the genesis of genius, we shall not hide the keen desire with which we were smitten and which we have obligingly satisfied, the opportunity having been offered, of digging as far as we could into the roots, the soil, the environment, the vital saps, the fertilizers, the chemistry and, above all, the souls from which issued that extraordinary, rarest of the rare, and ultimately unanalyzable, soul of a genius. We have, in our fashion, fulfilled that dream, the ambition of which has nothing ridiculous about it, we imagine, simple as it is, knowing that the best means possible, not of analysis but of partial explanation, is collecting, with patience and modesty, naively and methodically, impassioned by the slightest details, everything that a Saint-Simon curious about such a subject would have called the “ins and outs,” including the “round abouts.”

  Still, it is necessary not to linger on those that would be too distant. And that is why a few words will suffice to state—without enquiring as to the ifs, buts, hows and whys—that the director of the Jesuit Fathers established in the Channel Islands was the Comtesse’s cousin, that he had sent Abbé Denis Gasguin to tutor the Vicomte, then only just eight years old, and that by virtue of that association, evidently, he had easily been able to make Thibaud’s marriage.