The Wing

by Jean Richepin

  By the end of the first year after the return from Kairnheûz, Gasguin and Yvernaux no longer found pleasure in being together. They contented themselves with writing. Then the letters became rare. During the third of those four lamentable years, the correspondence between them was limited to vague epistles on New Year’s Day and anniversaries. During the final year, nothing at all.

  What would they have had to say to one another, in fact, except that each of them had returned to his own concerns had felt no need to introduce the other thereinto? What interest could the ambition to be a “thinker,” with which Yvernaux was still intoxicated, be to the petty professor of physics and chemistry that Gauguin had always been? It would make the poor devil envious, Yvernaux told himself. And of what importance to Yvernaux could be the desire for advancement that now limited the horizons of Gasguin, the humble universitarian. No importance at all, Gasguin sagely estimated. Given that, how could they have any desire to write, since their daughter and goddaughter was decidedly no longer, to the glory of both of them, a genius?

  The neglect to which Yvernaux condemned him pained Gasguin particularly, and rendered him more sensitive to the cruel disappointment caused by Geneviève. Without any malevolence or rancor, he made the child suffer for it—and thus she suffered doubly. For she sensed clearly—all too clearly—the present scorn of her godfather and father, and the abandonment of one and the resigned peevishness of the other had further envenomed her suffering, all the more so because she did not understand the reason for that peevishness and that abandonment, and thought them unjust. She was so keen to please her father! She devoted herself with so much zeal and patience to those harsh scientific studies that now pleased him so little!

  It was in that era of hard and often fruitless labor, of efforts as vain as they were assiduous to be a perfect pupil, that it was necessary to overcome the aversion that she was later to feel for examinations and syllabuses, beaten pathways by which one slowly travels the entire domain of the sciences when one wishes to conquer them rationally by means of small methodical steps.

  You will doubtless remember Yvernaux reproaching her frequently, ten or fifteen years later, for not having taken the trouble to obtain ore diplomas, and talking to her regretfully about the “doctoral toga” with the rabbit-fur trim, with which, he affirmed, she would have been able to deck herself had she wished. When he teased her about it, she often, you will remember, made fun of herself, laughing. Had she been less kind, and without being nasty, she would have had the right to reply to him, in all fairness: “It’s the fault of the ‘black hole’ in which you and my father, bad friends, forgot about me for four years.”

  What they had always ignored, in fact—not merely the godfather but the father, unpardonably since he was living with her—was that, in feeling that she had been abandoned in that “black hole,” the poor child had been at risk of the death, not merely of her genius, but her reason.

  That her genius was extinct she had not perceived, not knowing that he had had it. That the affection of the people she loved was lacking, she had fearfully observed, and felt dolorously—and her heart had been deeply wounded by it. And that is no mere metaphor; it was in full and atrocious reality that she nearly went mad because of it.

  Several times, the catastrophe had been close at hand: notably, during two crises of amnesia, which the physicians were obliged to treat blindly, without being able to diagnose either the why or the how; on another occasion, by virtue of an almost-epileptiform attack of nerves, of which they had even less understanding; then again, more slyly, in the course of an indeterminate fever vaguely labeled “consumption” and “languor.”

  And if Geneviève’s brain had not, in spite of everything, turned turtle and sank to the sea-bed in those four semi-shipwrecks when her poor head was taking in water at every hole—as Yvernaux would have said, had he been present and if he had understood what was happening—but had recovered her footing, her life, her intelligence and, finally, her resuscitated genius, she owed it all to Aunt Line.

  Oh, not to an Aunt Line capable of great lyrical images, although, on occasion, in her fashion…nor to a brain able to judge Geneviève’s, but to the being of atavistic devotion, of occult and instinctive knowledge, still lying in ambush in the worthy woman. What is genius? Of what did Geneviève’s consist? Aunt Line knew absolutely nothing about that, but she had once more been, all the same, the guardian and the rescuer, as Henri Fabre’s wasp is to the larvae she will never know.

  Never had she, the illiterate merlifiche, the one-time roadside “swindler,” the former maid-of-all-work in the Gasguin household, the present housekeeper in the black scarab bodice, the simpleton, had the slightest doubt about the great individual who was to blossom in Geneviève. Not that she ever pronounced the phrase “great individual,” which was too precise for her. She contented herself with designating it by the tiny and vague term “that,” and commenting on it thus in her obscure thoughts:

  “That, from Idalie, from the blood of the Hescheboix, which wants to spring forth again, having slept for such a long time.”

  After which, between her teeth, she added, not speaking for the others but for herself: “And I would breathe my last breath into it, amon, and die of it, in order that that might live.”

  But why, though? she asked herself, mutely, without pronouncing the words, although the question stood up straight in her head, like a serpent on its tail.

  Because needs must.

  Thus she replied, with closed lips, and without saying anything more—but her prominent eyebrows came together, and fused into a bar, so rigid was her determination.

  And, more ingenious than the physicians, she had cured her Geneviève of the two crises of amnesia, the epileptiform attack and the unnamable fever. And, better still, she had saved her above all from the ferocious tortures inflicted unwittingly on the girl by the scorn and abandonment of her father and godfather. She never ceased to give her back the confidence and hope that the unfortunate girl lost after so many vain efforts to become once again the pupil who had once made the master so proud, instead of remaining the pupil of whom he was now ashamed.

  “Courage!” she trumpeted, by means of her ever-enthusiastic and fervent gazes of admiration—for, if her speech was silent, the old woman’s eyes knew how to cry out and sound the charge.

  “Tomorrow, at six o’clock, you’ll understand again!”

  That also, in words this time, she often said to her. And the precision alone of that day and that hour, thus fixed, sufficed to lend fiber to Geneviève’s weary and broken will-power. Toward that day and hour, so imminent, she valiantly stretched out her energy and her hope—and the next day, at the specified hour, she forgot the prediction of the day before, only to hear the same person saying the same thing, in the same terms, and prolonging the hope and energy again.

  And thus, from day to day, the months had passed, and also the years, without Geneviève’s reason giving way, without her being buried, entombed in the black hole.

  So, with the memory of horror and mystery that she had retained, of the black hole, there had also remained in her heart a good and dear memory of Aunt Line. And that was the only luminous point in so much blackness—but the light within it was as soft as that in which her two months of paradise bathed. To such an extent that, sometimes, Aunt Line was deceived in saying so her suddenly, with her teasing smile: “Are you thinking about your windows again, amon?” For, at that moment, she ought to have said: “Right now, you’re in the black hole.” But that was when Geneviève, while being in the black hole, was not contemplating for the moment any of what had been so dismally black, but was concentrating the joyful attention of her memory on the point of soft light lit by Aunt Line’s devotion.

  And suddenly, flinging her arms around the old woman’s neck, she embraced her with all her reckless tenderness, gratefully—with the gratitude, it seemed, of her entire race, melted in that filial caress. And it was doubtless also the gratitude of th
e entire race that the good woman savored—for she, so seemingly grim in her stiff black scarab bodice, started weeping large, slow, heavy tears, of which she was ashamed.

  “What?” she said, rudely. “What’s got into you, you old crone, to wet your cheeks with all these teardops?”

  “Come on, Aunt Line,” Geneviève said, gently. “Let me drink your tears, your kind tears, which aren’t salty like others, but sweetened by your good heart.”

  And they were both laughing and crying. Aunt Line, to take her revenge, called her little faker, ferret-face, latusée, little devil of a cattelinette, like her grandmother Idalie. “Because, of course, it goes without saying, you led me astray just now, pretending you were thinking about your windows again, when you were in the black hole. Do you think I’m a ninny, amon?”

  “But you were, and a great one,” Geneviève riposted. “And you can’t tell, as you boast, where I am by my eyes alone. For just now, I didn’t have my eyes that were weeping pau l’dedins, and yet I was in the black hole. Only what was dgerlindait there were drelindindins of joy, because it was broad daylight in the black hole. Oh, not because my windows were lit up there, as you seem to believe, great ninny, I repeat, but because of a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful star, shining in the night and making sunlight there. And that star was you, Aunt Line—and that’s why, even in the black hole, I had my curly look.”

  And the two children, the old woman and the genius, embraced one another again, with tears of happiness, truly sweetened, as that great individual Geneviève had said, who also had a tiny flower of a soul.

  XIX

  By what manifestations, evidently singular and characteristic, had that monstrous eclipse ended, by which Geneviève’s intellectual sun remained completely veiled? That is a story whose circumstantial details it would be interesting to know, and whose development would be fascinating to follow closely. It would make a fruitful contribution to the study of physiology and psychology of genius, as yet so poorly documented.

  Unfortunately, we only have randomly-accumulated fragments of that story, conserved without order or method, and collected and transmitted with no serious critical concern, but rather according to a scarcely scrupulous whim. Such as they are, they can scarcely be useful from any but the picturesque viewpoint.

  It was mostly Gasguin, however, who accumulated those fragments—oh, as well as he could! One might have expected that he would have done better, but it was it was not be, so little of the philosopher was there in him. The meager facts by which Geneviève’s reawakening was revealed, he did not sense or perceive as typical, and was not at all anxious to clarify by means of their light the mechanism of that awakening. In any case, would he not only have attached real importance to the facts in terms of their pedagogical value, considered as theorems to understand or problems to resolve? The conscientious professor, which he was above all, had been uniquely enchanted by the progress made, step by step, remade by his docile pupil, outside of which, no other consideration of any sort had struck him.

  It was thus that he had—in good faith!—absolutely neglected to note any silly questions, absurd interruptions, or reveries pushed to the point of complete “absences,” through the holes of which, so to speak, an Yvernaux would surely have seen rays of sunlight emerge, ready to triumph over the eclipse.

  Some of these curious phenomena had, however, escaped the total oblivion to which they seemed to be condemned by Gasguin’s inattention: those whose singular enormity had excessively offended his common sense and exhausted his patience. When they had irritated him as quasi-voluntary stupidities, and he had reproached Geneviève for her seeming insolence, often with rudeness and scorn, it had transpired that the unfortunate girl thought such brutality in her regard unjust, and complained to Aunt Line.

  “Would you believe it?” she confided. “What a swine! I’d worked so hard on my lesson”—or “my problem”—“and he treated me like an imbecile, a blockhead, because I said to him…” or “because I sat there with my nose in the air, thinking that...”

  And Geneviève told her, unthinkingly, about the silly question or the absurd interruption with which, without intending to, she had “enlivened” the theorem or the problem, or the strange distraction she had had instead of following one of her father’s demonstrations, and what she had “seen” or “heard” during that distraction.

  It goes without saying that Aunt Line could not understand why the question or the interruption was silly or absurd. Even less could she take account, even approximately, of what Geneviève “saw” and “heard” in the course of the veritable “visual” or “auditory scientific hallucinations” that caused these “absences.” But it also goes without saying that, although she did not understand any of it, Aunt Line took an interest, with all her might, in the indisputably-captivating confidences and revelations of her darling, whose slightest word was gospel to her, and consequently worthy of being heard and collected with pious care.

  That is how the most interesting scraps of this story were conserved—conserved pell-mell, devoid of any order, as will be seen, in Aunt Line’s memory and glory-hole with the sayings, adages, mottoes, refrains, aphorisms and personal eccentricities with which it was cluttered. It was there, much later, under the dust of six or eight years, at random, among the hand-me-down rags of that bizarre bric-à-brac, that Yvernaux was to find it, when he resumed his project of writing his famous Treatise on the Innate Sciences. He then had the—quite justified—certainty of being able to find “in that Ennia’s dung-heap,”40 as he jokingly put it, a few inestimable pearls.

  Unfortunately, too—another sort of misfortune—he allowed himself, in collecting them without collating them, to put a little of himself into them, and sometimes more than a little. Inevitably, to be sure, and in spite of his perfect honesty! But the information furnished by Aunt Line was sometimes so shapeless, so obscure, and so difficult to interpret! Even more inevitably, and not in spite but because of her no-less-perfect honesty, she sometimes extended devoted adoration to insignificant trivia, transformed into pure relics! Upon these irrelevancies, presented if on a sort of paten, how could Yvernaux’s lyrical imagination not have worked retrospectively, giving meaning to their insignificance and carving reliquaries for the pretended relics?

  It was not entirely his fault that the collection and the transmission—or, rather, the translation—of these more-or-less curious details, some of them extraordinary and incredible, had been carried out without any critical intelligence. And when his Treatise on the Innate Sciences appears—if it ever does—in which mention of it is continually made in the Notes and Commentaries, it will be necessary not to treat him too harshly for the not-very-scrupulous but innocent—because involuntary—fantasy that presided, most of the time, over the drafting of those Notes and Commentaries. It will be best to take from them only that which a severe exegesis allows to filter through. And undoubtedly, we repeat, the physiological and psychological study of genius will profit from it far less that the merely picturesque viewpoint.

  At the risk of also encouraging the reproach of fantasy toward serious persons, but not to omit anything that might, even so, illuminate the mind of Geneviève, even by employing Yvernaux’s magic lantern, here are a few of the imageries seen in that magic lantern.

  They have not been chosen with overmuch order, nor method, and especially not with critical intelligence. To tell the whole truth, naked and ingenuous, one has to confess to being directed primarily by Yvernaux own choice, but guided—he affirmed—by that of Aunt Line in person. Like Molière reading his comedies to his simple servant Laforêt, the “thinker” Yvernaux did not disdain, in fact, to submit to humble Aunt Line the written version of the information that she had furnished him, and the passages that he has communicated here are exactly those about which the good woman said, without hesitation—even when visibly devoid of understanding:

  “Yes, that’s it, amon.”

  Yvernaux was, in any case, sufficiently impart
ial, although both judge and party, not to be afraid of recognizing that Geneviève, witnessing such readings, had fallen about laughing and had had the cheek to cry, in Aunt Line’s and her godfather’s faces: “But that’s not true! I never uttered such an insanity! Where did you get that story, Aunt Line? And what diabolical absurdity are you extracting from it, Godfather?”

  At which Aunt Line, behind her, would make desperate gestures to Yvernaux, to signify that Geneviève could not remember the incident or sentence incriminated with falsity. “Because,” she explained to Yvernaux subsequently when they were alone, “when it happens, she’s always absent, and doesn’t know afterwards.”

  And Yvernaux, sagaciously, concluded that the states of hypnosis in which these actions and words were produced left no trace in the conscious memory on awakening. He could have played a trump card then by confounding Geneviève with Grasset’s theory of the O and polygonal centers, but he carefully refrained, fearing that she would forbid Aunt Line to make the revelations from which she was profiting—and he preferred to let her believe that he was not, in fact, taking seriously the silly things invented by the old woman and the embroideries that he had added to them.

  “All right, all right!” he said. “Let’s not talk about it anymore. Aunt Line must have had a drink when she thought you’d said this or done that—as for me, when I wrote it down, I’d always had at least two drinks: one of cognac to get me going, and one of pride in thinking that you’re my goddaughter. Then, you understand, there’s a double dose of craziness—but what can it matter to you that I amuse myself drawing rockets of paradoxes and petards of images therefrom?”