The Wing

by Jean Richepin

  His mind being made for generalizing rather than for observation, he did not become a better man of science in consequence, but merely a logician and orator armed with more serious arguments. Most importantly, though, if the philosopher did not gain much thereby, the godfather, in compensation, benefited greatly and entirely. His admiration for his goddaughter acquired justification and substance. He was no longer limited, as he had been pitifully obliged to do before, to talking through his hat—his dunce’s cap, he said—when Gasguin credited Geneviève with some astonishing insight. Henceforth, he was able to measure the full amplitude, or very nearly, of the giant steps that she was taking in that veritable dance through the virgin forest of the sciences.

  For Gasguin had found the correct expression; it really was as a dancer, with agility, grace and a smile, that the young woman—or, rather, the 12-year-old girl—moved through the impenetrable undergrowth and intertwined creepers, penetrating its depths and clearing away its tangles. She did not put any visible effort into it. She was playing.

  Not entirely, for, at certain details—the simplest and often the most important—she stumbled, stupidly getting stuck. In confrontation with the higher obstacles, on the other hand, and the blackest pot-holes, she often reached the objective with a single bound. Then, her ease was miraculous.

  “When one thinks that she has learned something,” Gasguin often said, “one perceives that she had no need of being taught, for she had a sort of memory of it. Thus, for instance, yesterday...”

  And every time, there was a new story, as marvelous, in its genre, as the reinvention of Euclidean geometry by Pascal. So, at least, Yvernaux deemed it; and he had taken notes to support his admiring affirmations, which he proposed to publish in due course, in the guise of addenda to a Treatise on the Innate Sciences.

  One of those with which he was most satisfied, and which might give some idea of the “innateness” that was sometimes truly prodigious in Geneviève, is a note relative to the “Theory of Division,” and here it is:

  Gasguin told me, last vacation, to study the “Theory of Division,” and that I would only be certain of having a scrap of mathematical intelligence on the day when I had fully mastered that theory, one of the most difficult aspects of arithmetic. After spending a trimester in that study, I thought I had arrived at a thorough understanding, but the sort of comprehension I had did not give me any pleasure. I felt that it was still difficult, even tenebrous, with the viscous blackness of pitch, in which I found myself—as we say in Thiérache, using a word that really ought to have remained in the language—ahogué. At Christmas, I went to Gasguin’s house in order to deliver a present for Geneviève. It was a little electrical machine with a big box of apparatus, for that’s the sort of plaything she prefers. She thanked me, and told me that she wanted to give me a present too. And this is what it was. Her father had told her, entirely against my wishes, that the “Theory of Division” did not seem clear to me and that I was not very happy about it. Now, she became indignant about that because nothing, to her—nothing in the world, she said—seemed clearer, more beautiful and more delightful. Those were the three adjectives she used. Then she gave me an “oral exam” to see how I had got turned around—that expression is hers too. I did get turned around, spinning like a demon in holy water.

  “Oh, poor godfather,” she said, with affectionate pity. “I can see that you don’t find that funny—but it’s dismal. Where did you get all those steps from? One might think it was from an ox?”

  “From the authorized course at the Polytechnique, which your father told me to take.”

  “Papa’s playing a practical joke on you. Why didn’t he tell you about the problem we did the other day, which explains everything so nicely?”

  I interrogated Gasguin. He blushed. He confessed to me that he had indeed, in selfish jealousy, kept to himself the new theory that Geneviève had invented very recently, in solving a problem, to amuse herself and without attaching any importance to it, with the sole desire of delighting herself.

  And Geneviève told me her theory, politely and slyly, as if she were telling me a story full of surprises—and there was a series of surprises, to be sure, and delights. One would have thought that she was, as her father put it, dancing—instinctively, without having learned it. Arithmetic? Let’s go, then! To her three exact epithets—clear, beautiful, delightful—I would add “sublime,” quite simply. I wept and laughed with joy at the same time. And Gasguin, for the first time, did me the honor of finding that I had a glimmer of mathematical intelligence, since I was sensitive to the elegance of such a thing.

  There follows, in the notes appended to the Treatise on the Innate Sciences, the theory of division itself, as Geneviève had explained it to her father, and then to her godfather. For Yvernaux had been able to write it down what the little girl had said—and the most miraculous thing about the business was that, so vivid was the impression it made on him, he had retained not only the steps, but also the dancing gait, with its elegance, its agility, its grace, and its cheerfulness.

  One can imagine that such sensual delights were a paradise forbidden to Aunt Aline. Had the poor creature tried in vain to penetrate it, Gasguin and Yvernaux would have prohibited access, leaving Cherubim with flaming swords posted on the threshold.

  And that was exactly the attitude they had taken—Yvernaux had been unable to help being witty in observing it—the only time the uninitiate had said, timidly: “I’d like to know that she’s talking about, which makes your eyes catch fire.” The scornful gazes with which they had crushed her, without making any reply, had driven her back into her shell of silence and confusion, from which she never dared emerge again before the two of them.

  On one other occasion, she had risked asking Gasguin a small question when he was alone. Less puffed up with pride on that occasion, he had contented himself, without any rebuke, by explaining to her gently and mournfully that there were things that a woman could not understand.

  Having retreated into her shell again—a definitive retreat for the time being, Aunt Aline concentrated her puzzlement in a reflection that desiccated her: “Is she not a woman, then?” And she admired her more, in considering her as not being what she herself was, imagining her as something approaching the fairies, perhaps, or the saints, or more probably those in the times of inverted saints who had “cavorted” at Sabbats. Well, was here anything surprising in that? Had not Idalie, her grandmother, been a “Cattelinette”?

  Her devotion to Geneviève was tainted henceforth with superstitious terror. Already, sine the “that” scene, it will be remembered, she had largely given up emitting her sallies in the form of oracles or aphorisms. The rebukes, and the pity regarding her ignorance, irrevocably condemned no longer to understand Geneviève, had completed her diminution. Her present fear reduced her, for a time, to no longer being anything but the “simple” wretched object of indifference that everyone believed her to be because she was no longer in communication with anyone—even Geneviève now, it seemed.

  She was bitterly sad about that. She had the depressing conviction of no longer having any part to play in the great event to come. Was her role as an instinctive and occult preparer of the way over, then? She had previously played it—without spelling it out, it is true, but sensing it—with everything she had to give. No longer being haunted or sustained, she fell back to being the humble worthy woman uniquely absorbed in household matters.

  It was for that reason that she had at length become once again, in Gasguin’s mind and even Yvernaux’s, the neat and mousy little old woman she gave every appearance of being. They had forgotten, or at least allowed to fade away into the obscure cellars of their memory, so much of the strangeness by which she characterized herself. And the vague effigy that they had unjustly and too frequently formed of her lot was, unjustly, that of an individual without any distinct personality, less a person than an old piece of furniture, always situated in some corner of the house.

 
Nevertheless, and without ever seeming to, she continued to be impassioned, in spite of everything, by anything that manifested Geneviève’s grandeur. Although, in fact, she did not understand her at all now, she knew that the girl knew enough of what her father knew to fill him with joy, pride and amazement. And Yvernaux’s grand metaphors, whose terminology usually seemed to her to be a foreign language, were intoxicating to her, because she got drunk on their praise of Geneviève.

  Even with no other delight than that, she would soon have ended up consoling herself for no longer being the preparer and predictor of anything. Fortunately, she had one other, even more profound and unexpected, and the recompense of all her occult devotion: it was that, when she believed her idol had drawn away, she found her one day even closer, more familiar, more intimate than ever, almost more so than in the blissful times of her earliest infancy.

  Geneviève, in fact, had quickly penetrated the secret of the devotion and the terror she inspired in Aunt Aline. She found them quite sweet and divinely enjoyable, all the more so because they were hidden, for she did not admit Gasguin, or anyone else, to the celebration of mutual rediscovery of their two hearts.

  The celebration was exquisite, though. Alone with her Geneviève in the sealed den of their mutual confidence, Aunt Aline rediscovered her popular soul, with the mottoes and sayings handed down from the distant past, and bearing on the distant future. And if the good woman sometimes trembled before venturing them, it was a tremor that was dear to her, because Geneviève immediately calmed it with a caress, to thank her, and soothed her with childish words of reassurance.

  “Core, core, Aunt Line,” she said, affecting, to please her, to speak Thiérachian to her. “I need to be coddled, and no one but you knows how to put me at my ease.”

  XIII

  Without her good Aunt Line’s grandmotherly “coddling,” without the release that Geneviève found therein, and especially without the habit that the worthy and safe guardian resumed of mounting her guard and perpetual vigilance around the treasure, the treasure would have run a considerable risk of being lost. The poor little child-prodigy, in fact, might have fallen victim to her own genius. The real “ingrate age” for her was around her thirteenth year, in an extremely violent crisis that coincided exactly with the most powerful excitement of the cerebral excesses revolutionizing the other side of her.

  Quite innocently, and because she delivered herself without apparent expense to those excesses, her father had never thought about the precocious wear and tear that her feminine nerves, still in formation, must be suffering in consequence. Yvernaux, whose intelligence was less abstract, whom life had more fully steeped in humanity, would have been more likely to perceive it, but he was absent at the time and very far away, on an expeditionary voyage to Ceylon—a matter of initiating himself into the lore of Buddhism, a fantasy that he had long wanted to fulfill. Thus, the unfortunate Geneviève, prey to the critical metamorphosis that every young woman must undergo, and simultaneously put under increasing scientific pressure by her father, marveling at the gifts which he saw becoming frenetic within her, was genuinely in danger of death.

  If Aunt Line had been, as she had quite recently, separated from her by her disdain for others, but her own admiration terrorizing her and by the renunciation of the role she thought unnecessary, that was what would have happened to the girl. She had no suspicion herself of the double peril she was in, of the two currents that were about to collide within her and bring about a conflagration of her entire being. Fortunately, Aunt Aline perceived the effluvia and, suddenly recovering her former authority, exclaimed one day to Gasguin: “Shall I only have lived in order to be killed?”

  “Who is killing you?” Gasguin had demanded, without understanding.

  “You and your sap,” she had replied. And, remembering one of the words proffered some thirteen years before about “flumes,” she had added, with her old sibylline air: You know full well that she has been a plant, in the time of times. Yes, a plant, plant, plant!”

  She repeated the word, emphasizing it more every time, because Gasguin, bewildered, continued not to understand. So he replied, bitterly, under the rain of blows that the word thus repeated inflicted upon him: “I hear you, you old madwoman, I hear you—but I thought you were cured of your nonsense.”

  She had looked deep into his eyes—a gaze like a drill that bored into him—and, without paying any heed to the insult, had simply said, while driving in the drill-bit: “I’m trying to bore a hole into your heart, to see if you still love your daughter.”

  “More than ever!” he cried, stunned by sudden and real anguish. “I adore her, as you know full well—she’s the only thing I adore. What, then? Is it true, that she’s threatened with…?”

  Her dared not go on, having read, engraved in him by the drill, words speaking of death, whose imminent reality he was afraid to render by expressing them aloud. But the worthy woman, a seeress once again, knew that he had finally understood, and she made the twisting drill into a blade, which she planted full in his heart, thus:

  “She’s in agony, yes, the plant.” Then, grimly, like an animal defending its young: “And while the sap is eating her away from below, you’re burning her from above—there!” She has seized him by the wrists, and shook him with imperious syllables. “That, you shan’t do any more. That, I forbid.”

  Frightened, Gasguin had given her full authority to save Geneviève, to whom Aunt Line had immediately explained, while pampering her, amid cajoleries for little children and with patois expressions dear to both of them, that it was necessary to give up studying completely and not to rack her brains any more over anything, and to live like a blade of grass, which grows and has nothing to do but grow.

  “Good!” Geneviève had said, joyfully, instantly subjugated. “That’s very amusing. It’s true that I’m a blade of grass; I can feel myself in the process of growing. You’re right, you know. It’s necessary to grow first, to do nothing but grow.”

  And she clapped her hands, kicked as if dangling from the hangman’s rope, resumed an entirely childish nature, and instantly, in profound obedience to the abnormal, even monstrous being that she had constituted so long ago, leap-frogged over the exceptional being—that stranger of sorts, abolished in an instant, swallowed up in a hole that she had passed over in a great leap backwards—and rejoined the other little being of thirteen years before, the blower of peas, in whom she felt the desire to recommence her existence. Such had been the abrupt shock of her “reviviscence,” as some physician of both the body and the soul might have analyzed it. There was no one with her to write that analysis—but for sure, if Aunt Line had had the talent to write down what she was doing, in reality, by mans of her instinctive power of suggestion, those are some of the things she would have said so much better.

  Abbé Denis had assisted in that curious regeneration without understanding it any more than his brother. Just as the latter might, if informed and specialized, have been a good physician of the body, so the Abbé might have been a good doctor for the soul—but neither of them, dissociated as they were, was capable of combining the two therapeutics into one. In sum, even in combination, they could not have saved Geneviève. Once she was saved, though, each of them attributed the merit to himself, and wanted to supervise her convalescence.

  The physician, it must be said in all fairness, retained the idea of a malady of maturation that Aunt Aline had cared for as a good lay nurse. More delicate, the Abbé, a man of refined psychology, claimed that scientific work was too arid for a young woman and that what Geneviève lacked more than anything else was ideal nourishment.

  “By the way,” he insinuated, “what are you doing, from the religious viewpoint? I’m quite certain that you haven’t become, in spite of your renunciation of the ecclesiastic estate, either a miscreant or an indifferent. So why aren’t you more anxious about her soul? The last time we saw one another—three years ago, alas—I talked to you about that scruple, and you seemed to m
e disposed to have her learn the catechism with a view to her first communion. You haven’t told me anymore. What happened?”

  Slightly confused before his elder brother, changed into a Reverend Father admonishing him as to his fate, Thibaud was obliged to admit, stammering, that he had given it no further thought. Nor had anyone else around her! He, Thibaud, had come a long way from his past—without any hostility against that that past, to be sure, but without any idea either of returning to it, since a slight crisis when people had wanted to marry him off. As for Yvernaux, the less said the better. He had never been a very fervent Catholic, even at the Seminary. And Aunt Aline had not practiced religion for a very long time. Had she ever believed? When and in what? No one knew. In that case...

  “In brief,” the Abbé had continued, “if you’re not careful, you’ll turn your daughter into an atheist.”

  “Oh no—impossible!” the former good seminarian had exclaimed. For the conviction had remained, at least, in default of personal faith, that religion was a good thing for women.

  Why and how had that theory remained a dead letter with regard to Geneviève? He really did not know. But that was not proof that he was nourishing some preconceived aversion to having her given religious instruction. She herself, consulted, for form’s sake by Aunt Aline, did not experience any reluctance in that respect, nor did Aunt Aline see anything objectionable in it.

  It will amuse her, the old woman said to herself. And the girl, for her part, merely at the possible advent in her life of something new, had, like a curious child, thought the same. The mathematics and physics into which she had already made inroads, had a strong grip on her heart, in spite of her desire to be a blade of grass just growing, as her old Aunt suggested; and to help her detach herself from them, it required nothing less than the announcement of that beautiful unknown about which the Abbé had spoken as another science, the science of God: religion.