“Oh, if it’s to amuse yourself, Godfather...”
“Not just me,” he interjected, “but Aunt Line as well. Look at her eyes! She too is extracting petards of joy and rockets of ecstasy.”
Geneviève could not help observing that Aunt Line really did have a blissful expression, and generally concluded, with polite acquiescence: “Given that it gives the two of you so much pleasure, then, dress her blunders in your silk and gold, Godfather. Go on, continue to amuse yourselves. Don’t hold back!”
And they didn’t hold back, in fact, as you will finally be able to judge, from these few extracts from the Notes and Commentaries to the Treatise on the Innate Sciences—extracts that have been prepared so that their value can henceforth be estimated at its true worth, neither more or less.
XX
At the moment of going to press, we find ourselves under a sudden and absolute obligation to renounce the publication of the present chapter, without having had, in consequence, the time—nor the desire, moreover—to rewrite the preceding and following chapters. This is the reason, as unexpected as it is imperious, the honest explanation of which will take the place of the chapter itself, suppressed ipso facto.
The prodigious event whose ultimate relation will be the conclusion of this story has not been, nor will be, the object of a communication to the official scientific world. Very few people know about it as a great scientific event, even among the people who pride themselves on being up to date in such matters. In that, they are in the same situation as the general public, whom the newspapers have informed of the material “fact” and nothing more, and who have seen nothing else in it, taking it quite simply for one of the various facts, so frequent and almost ordinary nowadays, gathered under the rubric of Aviation.
A few more perspicacious minds, more alert in tracking the solutions reported every day to that present and exciting problem, have nevertheless scented something new here—entirely new. Among the first rank of those capable of anything in trying to “set the record” for being “collectors of original documents concerning the modern sport par excellence” is the representative of a celebrated American publishing house.41 Yvernaux, whose excessive lyricism does not prevent him, as you know, from occasionally indulging in word play—often badly—even risked one, claiming that the house of “Édition,” was, behind a mask, the house of “Edison.”
It does not matter, anyway, by whom and for whose profit that sort of monopolization is operated. The essential thing is that the coup was carried out and that it had for its specific objet, and specifically in consequence of the aforementioned prodigious event, everything concerning the preparatory work from which Geneviève’s discovery emerged. And one must believe that the famous “document collector” was on the lookout for the least immediately-detectable and, as it were, the most distant of these “luxury documents,” if one might put it that way, for he has not hesitated to acquire for his house, with the exclusive right of publication in all forms, even of Blaise Yvernaux’s Treatise on the Innate Sciences. He had undoubtedly got wind—from whom?—of the Notes and Commentaries, certain anecdotes of which had been revealed, albeit in secret and to a few intimates, not in written form but by oral citation.
We cannot hold it against the author of the “famous” Treatise—still incomplete, of course—if he was legitimately excited by the flattering offer and accepted it. It is appropriate to say, to his credit, that financial considerations had nothing to do with his acquiescence, for he has generously donated to his goddaughter all the authorial rights that his Treatise on the Innate Sciences might produce. What convinced him to make the deal, and drag Gasguin and Geneviève into the conspiracy, is the all-powerful publicity that the American house has at its disposal, and which can henceforth be placed in the service of an invention destined, in his eyes, to revolutionize the world.
In the meantime, it is nonetheless forbidden to publish, until further notice, the Notes and Commentaries to the Treatise. An exception has been made, you will have noticed, for the note, of no real practical importance, comprising the anecdote on the theory of division you have read in chapter XII.
It is permissible, moreover, by means of that anecdote and so many phrases and metaphors, so many poetic or paradoxical effusions, directly borrowed by Yvernaux, to imagine fairly accurately what those Notes and Commentaries must be like. Their interest, ultimately—we must insist—is far more literary than scientific. Although Yvernaux’s vanity might suffering somewhat, and the American’s too, perhaps it is permissible to believe that the representative of the American publishing house, in buying the rights to the Treatise on the Innate Sciences, was not, as our forefathers would say, striking a good bargain. The majority of the Notes and Commentaries, which would seem inappropriate and bizarre in a scientific journal, might have been better placed in some lyrical avant-garde—or arrière-garde—periodical, in the form of poems in prose.
In renouncing, since it is necessary, the publication here of the advertised extracts, we are not renouncing the pleasure—all the more agreeable for being slightly forbidden—of leaving in the text of this story many of the expressions of florid imagery, previously or subsequently collected in the text of the Notes, with which Yvernaux made up the slides of his magic lantern.
XXI
Furthermore, nowhere in the Notes and Commentaries to the Treatise on the Innate Sciences, nor anywhere else but here—where these few supplementary pages are being added for the purposes of exception—is any mention made, or could there be any mention made, of the primordial and capital incident by which Geneviève herself had felt herself emerge from the eclipse of her genius. She alone, in fact, had been both the theater and the witness of it, and this time, for the only time in her life, she truly perceived something that was within her, and greater than her, and foreign to her, and left a double impression, either of that which she imagined as her genius, or of a delirious passenger, but ready in either case to turn into pure mental alienation.
The person to whom she was one day to make the very moving confession, at such a tragic moment—the mysterious individual that you will soon see involved in Geneviève’s life, in such an intense fashion, only spoke of it himself, and very discreetly, to one person. That person was not Yvernaux, nor Gasguin, nor even Aunt Line. It was a priest, a friend of Abbé Denis Gasguin and, through him—having met him in China, where both were missionaries—of the Abbé’s former pupil, the young Comte de Ponthual-Plouër.
In what circumstances did Geneviève make that strange confession, and to whom? And by what channel did the story reach these pages? The moment has not yet come to reveal that, and perhaps it never will. All that it is appropriate not to leave unsaid is that the revelation of the story is being made without Geneviève’s knowledge, it is true, but not without the tacit assent of the person who received the first confession, and with the formal authorization of the person who decided—or rather who was expressly determined—to pass it on.
When the incident in question occurred, Geneviève had just begun her eighteenth year.
During the four years of the “black hole,” although her intelligence had been at a low ebb, sometimes debilitated to the point of stupidity—even, as Gasguin shouted in fits of anger, to idiocy—she had enjoyed, by way of compensation, the most admirable physical health. She was never to recover, to tell the truth, the full development of the robust plant into which she then blossomed. The hard and assiduous work that her father pitilessly heaped upon her, far from hindering that strong sap, seemed rather to overexcite it. Like a boy at play, it only increased her appetite.
Aunt Line, amazed, sometimes said to her: “Even with your nose in books, you’re thriving.”
“Yes,” Gasguin put in, “like children guzzling pap.”
“Leave her alone!” Aunt Line retorted. “She’s growing.”
“Yes,” the professor complained, furiously, “she’s growing like a weed, for there’s no longer anything but weeds in her brain now�
�weeds, weeds, filthy weeds.”
And Geneviève began to cry, wounded by the injustice of the reproach—since she was working as hard as she possibly could, in vain expense—but also confused by her scandalous good health, since her poor brain seemed to be its victim. She was truly ashamed of not feeling any remorse, nor getting any headaches, in that weed-cluttered brain. But when her father had gone, she smiled through her tears at the thick slice of bread and jam made for her by Aunt Line—who, on watching her eat it avidly, rubbed her hands and muttered joyfully: “Even when she cries, she still thrives.”
There was, therefore, no reason for Geneviève, in that state of stable vigor and regular growth, to experience any malaise whatsoever. So she was amazed one day, immediately after a scene of this sort, while digesting her bread and jam, at peace with her conscience as with her stomach, suddenly to feel a absolute void in her brain, ordinarily so comfortable in spite of the weeds and the labor with which it was overloaded.
It was an entirely physical sensation, and real, of emptiness—not an imagination, an idea! It was as if everything that she had in her brain, good or bad or anything else, had been removed by a single stroke of the piston of a vacuum pump.
She was familiar with the effects of that machine, by virtue of having seen it in action many times in the course of experiments: the light of combustion extinguished under the bell-jar, and life too. And in her brain, abruptly and brutally, the same effects had just been produced: no more light, save for a pale electrical spark, and no more life! There was nothing henceforth within her skull but a sort of night. Not a black night; a pale, gray night. And in that grayness and paleness, a little dead bird.
At that terrible moment, Aunt Line was beside Geneviève, and yet, nothing must have been apparent in the face or the eyes of the young woman, for the old one, looking at her directly, had not said a word not even made a gesture.
Can’t you see what’s happening to me?
That was what Geneviève had wanted to shout, without being able to do so. Then it seemed that she had recovered the ability to emit the cry that remained in her throat, but by that time the words to express what she wanted to say had fled her memory—and not only those words, but all words! Then, after the words, it was thought itself that escaped—and finally, sensation too.
Of all that, quite clear within the vagueness, she had retained the memory, as far as the moment of total annihilation, in which she had perceived “Absolute Nothing for an eternity.”
Those first two words in combination, which she deliberately emphasized in her confession, insisting upon them, had not had the slightest significance for her then, but had had one, more precise and concrete, as sublime as absurd, during the no less sublime and absurd eternity in which she had perceived the Absolute Nothing. As for that eternity, it had certainly had a duration less than that of a lightning-flash, since while traversing it—in the fashion of a circumference—Genevève had continued to seen in Aunt Line’s eyelids, always at the same point, the lashes commencing a blink, while the infinite gulf of that eternity was perpetually open before the brain that was plunging into it.
But many other things had taken place during that lightning eternity, before Geneviève had seen Aunt Line’s incomplete blink. There had been so many of them that several eternities, it seemed, would not have been sufficient even to name them.
Some of those things, however, stood out as if in relief from all possible forgetfulness. Some, moreover, were ineffable, quite unevocable in words, even in that phantomatic state. There were others, on the contrary, whose translation, even into current language, happened of its own accord, almost imposing itself—for Geneviève had very often been haunted by them thereafter, to the point of obsession.
There was, above all, a myriad of constellations replacing all the extinct light in the void of her brain, and also an immense aviary of birds singing the resurrection of the little dead bird. Those constellations, furthermore, affected the form of equations with countless terms, each of which engendered a whole endless series of numbers. And the chorus of birds added “living” words to the music denoted by these terms and numbers.
And “someone”—she did not know who—said then, with regard to these “living” words:
“For algebra is only the ashes of numbers, and numbers are the souls of which things are the bodies; and everything is born from nothing.”
And while the voice of that “someone” spoke thus, a gesture traced, on the blackboard of unlimited space, the “sideways eight,” ∞, which is the mathematical symbol of infinity, and then the multiplication sign, x, before a zero, and then the sign for equivalence, =; and from the latter emerged, in an endless incessant turbulent cataract, all the numbers; after which, the sideways eight having vanished, the endless incessant cataract of numbers went back into the egg of the original zero and were lost therein; and, the voice having fallen silent, the gesture having vanished, the blackboard of unlimited space itself evaporated, bringing back total nothingness.
But the most fantastic aspect of that entire vision was that, amid the cataracts of numbers, those whirlwinds of figures, those cyclones of algebraic formulae, two equations of a new character had been expressly “dictated” to Geneviève, the memory of which remained exact. Now, they had been “dictated” not by “someone” any longer but by “something”—she had perceived—that was within her, and greater than her, and foreign to her, and which recited to her alternately, with veneration and then with mockery, and vice versa, repeating it within her to the pint of satiety, the two affirmations differing by the transposition (alternate-internate,42 she affirmed, without being able to comprehend the why of that geometrical qualification) of the two expressions, the reverent and the mocking:
“Hello, genius! Goodbye, folly!”
When she finally emerged from all these things and an infinity of others, and after that eternity during which Aunt Line’s eyelashes had not advanced the blink they had commenced one iota, Geneviève had not dared to ask the old woman anything, seeing that, for her, nothing at all had happened. The sensation of the void in her brain, like that under the globe of a vacuum pump, had returned, and then she had resumed her work in progress, in the fashion of a somnambulist, “conscious, but dead”—another two words that she emphasized without understanding them. Eventually, that evening, she had gone to bed as usual, save for the persistent sensation of a physical void in her brain.
From the next day onwards, she had gradually lost her beautiful blossoming of a robust plant, and begun to develop her definitive appearance, thinner and stiffer. In compensation, however, as soon as she awoke, she had recovered the two characteristic equations dictated within her and to her by the “something” greater than her.
Subsequently, one of those two equations became the very formula, fundamental and generative, of her most startling discovery.
XXII
All things considered, Yvernaux’s absence and complete abandonment had been a great boon to Geneviève at that time, and very probably the conclusive salvation of her genius, which was in a critical phase. Likewise for the mental denseness of her father, who was to go for some time yet without observing the end of the eclipse, and would become more impatient in the meantime, and sometimes press the harshness of hat impatience to a veritable brutality, of which the poor girl was the victim. Had Yvernaux been present, of even in continued epistolary contact with them, and Gasguin endowed with a more sensitive touch with which to take the pulse of genius, that genius might perhaps have risked resembling one of those unhealthily hasty trees which only grow leaves without producing fruit.
Who can tell, moreover, whether Aunt Line, in her habitual fashion, might not have been brushed in an occult manner by the effluvial “aura” of that double peril of the godfather’s premature return and the father’s premature realization? So many things she said at the time authorized the belief, their apparent simplicity concealing an underside of profound meaning relevant, if one were able to
pay any heed to it, to the situation in question.
Why, in fact, did no one pay any heed, given the intonation with which the aged Sibyl was able to emphasize her words, and the sly winks or profound gazes with which she illuminated them, like zigzag lightning-flashes or sheets of flame?
One day, when her father had been particularly brutal to her, by means of the kind of brutality that horrified her more than any other—which is to say, coarse jokes and vulgar acidity—Geneviève had baulked like a racehorse, with a pooh of disgust, and had then come to seek consolation from Aunt Line, saying to her:
“I’ve had enough of swallowing his acid iniquities. I’m going to leave his house, to earn my bread somewhere else, as best I can.”
“Let it be,” the old woman had replied, sententiously. “It’s the acids of the leaven that made the dough rise. The dough has yet to rise.” Then, in a low, mysterious voice, her eyes heavy with thought, recalling a Thiérachian distich or some ancient ballad, or perhaps improvising, she sang:
Tindis qu’ti ming’s tin pain noir d’hui,
Ch’bois fieume où tin bline s’ra cuit.43
On another occasion, all alone, Geneviève thought, bitterly, about the absence of her godfather, and all though her lips never moved or emitted a sound, she said to herself internally, uttering a profound sigh:
What a pity I can’t talk to him about that “someone” who speaks inside me now, and so often tells me incomprehensible things!
For on several more occasions, in a much less intense manner, and by means of vaguer representations and expressions, she had had fits analogous to the one she called “the crisis of the two equations.” These further fits were only comparable to the first by virtue of the sensation, still strong but now obscure and confused, although perceptible, of that “someone” or “something” greater than herself, foreign to her, whose haunting presence, and especially speech, almost always tenebrous, never failed to cause her embarrassment, which was sometimes difficult to bear in her solitude.
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