The Wing

by Jean Richepin

  And that is why, alone at that moment, she mutely regretted not having her godfather with her, whose lyricism was always ready to translate everything into images. In the murky speech of the “someone” who came expressly to impose on Geneviève mind something akin to a helmet of darkness, Yvernaux’s metaphorical speech, she thought, would have planted such luminous plumes! And because she was unable to light the fireworks herself and turn them into fires of joy, she expressed her chagrin and discouragement in a profound sigh.

  At that very moment, Aunt Line came in, her mouse-like scurry even more urgent than usual. One might have thought that she was hastening to the rescue. Whose, if not Geneviève’s? And Geneviève had so clear an impression of it that she could not help saying, point-blank: “No, I didn’t call you, Aunt Line.”

  “Yes, yes,” the old woman had replied. “I’m answering.”

  “I swear to you that I never opened my mouth.”

  “I heard you, all the same.”

  Then an embarrassed silence having followed those rattled-off replies, Aunt Line had said, not with a wink this time, but looking straight into Genevieve’s frightened eyes: “The one you to whom called has no need to be here. Quite the reverse!”

  Without being unduly astonished that her unexpressed thought had been read by Aunt Line—for she was accustomed to that frequent telepathy between the two of them—Geneviève had merely and immediately demanded the reason for that “quite the contrary,” whose hostility toward her godfather was manifest. And that did astonish her.

  “Yvernaux,” the old woman had replied, “your Yvernaux. Ha ha ha!”

  Then, abruptly, her mouth had tightened around her outburst of laughter to form an o—and, at the height of the most bizarre excitement, as if, in laughing in that fashion, she had found a pretext for dancing vocally on that vowel “o,” in an explosion of assonances crowning improvised verses of a sort, she had squawked:

  Your Yvernaux

  Came home too slow

  The fire aglow

  In the stove’s throw

  Caused an overflow

  Of milk like snow

  To the fire below

  A waste! O woe!44

  At first, Geneviève laughed too, like the overgrown child she still was, in spite of her seventeen completed years. After which, especially in the days that followed, on reflection, she had been more inclined to take that litany of silly lines as a serious warning—of what? no matter—on which Aunt Line had offered a grave and unexpected commentary herself, in practical prose, when she returned to the subject the next day.

  “Your godfather is better where he is. Let him stay there!”

  Geneviève had been annoyed, in truth, by that condemnation, but was immediately consoled, happily, on learning that the exile was not permanent—for, to her question, asked with a sincere sadness: “Shall we never see him again, my poor godfather?” Aunt Line had replied: “Yes, just as we have seen him again before.”

  “And when shall we see him again?” Geneviève had added.

  “Oh, you’re asking too much of me. That I don’t know. Perhaps I shall—but not yet.”

  “Are you sure you don’t know? Tell me, Aunt Line, are you finally sure?”

  In the face of this wheedling insistence and the tender Thiérachian inflection of the adverb, Aunt Line smiled and muttered: “Indeed! To know, at least, that I don’t know, Chipette...hang on. Does one ever know what one knows without knowing it? Wait! Wait!”

  A long pause, her gaze seemingly looking inward; a profound inhalation of air, followed by a long exhalation; then a pause in which there seemed no longer to be any respiratory movement of any sort—and Aunt Line, finally breathing again, very pale, the corners of her lips slightly flecked with foam, murmured: “Another not quite a week and a half of years since we saw him last.”

  Geneviève did not know that once before, before she was born, that it was after a similar term, of approximately ten years—a period called by Aunt Line, in the language of a merlifiche seeress, “not quite a week and a half of years”—that Yvernaux had made his first reentry into Gasguin’s life. Ready as she was not to be astonished by anything with Aunt Line, the young woman would certainly have found in that coincidence—and in the subsequent verification of the similar prediction—grounds to profess more confidence still, if that were possible, in the old visionary’s suggestions. But she had no need of that proof, in addition to so many others, to have faith in her good fairy, as she called her, and to obey her. So, from that day on, she had ceased to regret Yvernaux’s absence, content to wait, with a foundation of desire, for the return now fixed or seven years hence.

  Similarly, she was resigned to endure without complaint her father’s unjust severity, merely taking revenge in her own fashion—which was certainly no less cruel! For that revenge consisted of the absolute ignorance to which she resolutely condemned him of the reawakening, more and more evident to her, but only to her, of that which he had once called—as she knew from Aunt Line—her “Pascalian genius.”

  The old woman fully approved of her acting thus, taking as much joy as the child herself put into the secret of her reawakening—but not as a result of testimony authenticating the fact, as one might think, although Geneviève could have done that fully for her father by revealing to him, for example, the two equations of her mathematical vision. Quite apart from the fact that Aunt Line would not have understood any of it, was not an affirmation without the shadow of any evidence sufficient for her? And the profound intoxication of pride that the old woman experienced therein, befuddling as it was, held no danger for Geneviève, who was used to being, a profound object of admiration for her, even in the fallow era of the black hole.

  By contrast, Gasguin’s enthusiasm, and that of Yvernaux’s even more so, in response to the young woman’s resuscitated genius, would have been deadly to her. The mathematical vision, revealed to her father, would have dazzled him, positively blinding him, and would have defected him from completing his patient professorial task, still so necessary to the full maturation of the genius, the sap of which required cultivation, fertilization, direction and perhaps grafting. The child prodigy, deprived of nourishing substance, would have risked becoming an abortion, a hydrocephalus, a monster.

  The disaster would have been worse, for sure, with Yvernaux’s purely metaphysical vision, open to the soaring of lyricism. He would have drawn her away with him in a frenetic flight, lending her soul to the delirium into which it had already strayed of its own accord. In the heavens of Abstraction, the Absolute, of Being and Nothingness, and Essentials, in which more solid brains have sometimes first misted over and then volatilized, Geneviève’s would have been bound to melt almost instantaneously A primarily lyrical mind is capable of being drawn out there by images, in which it can, at least, slake its thirst for the Beautiful, but a primarily scientific mind, finding no pasture there for its appetite for Truth, withers away from inanition or swells up with folly to bursting point.

  Reduced to the wine of admiration that Aunt Line poured out for her, to which she had been accustomed since infancy, Geneviève was never “intoxicated” by it, as the English say.45 Her faith in herself, strong enough frequently to make her conscious of the worth she had, and, above all, promised one day to have, in the Sciences, did not go so far as to poison her with an infatuated vanity that would have prevented her from working.

  Furthermore, the revelatory vision of her genius—a vision that other rises of the same sort had corroborated—far from filling her with an inordinate pride, had made her slightly mistrustful, having frightened her. The afterthought subsisting that she might have lost her mind, and might still, if the occasion arose, tormented her like an odious nightmare. As the mathematician she was, in spades, she valued above all else the stability, rectitude, equilibrium and sane logic of her reason and was, in a manner of speaking, coquettish about it.

  Thanks to the concurrence of all these circumstances, and perhaps also the ob
scure guard mounted over it by Aunt Line’s occult clairvoyance, the slow and complete growth of Geneviève’s genius could be accomplished in peace, during the seven years taken up by the incubation that had followed the eclipse.

  It took Gasguin himself three full years to begin to perceive the taste gradually recovered by his pupil for subject-matter that she had first called, and often still called, the “bitterest” in the syllabus. For, with his mania for determinedly-routine method, in order to make certain, it goes without saying that the professor had never admitted any caprice into the program of study, although the pupil sometimes wished that he would. The syllabus had been strictly followed, in total. The entire domain of modern science had been covered and conquered by assiduous, progressive, scrupulous assimilation, with the products of each sector carefully classified and stored. Impossible to wander idly here or there, to more agreeable spots or less brackish springs. It had been necessary to swallow everything, and pause on the arduous and stony sites for as long as the others, or even longer, since there was less desire to possess them but they had to be mastered anyway.

  Wherever she had had to make special efforts, the courageous adolescent had persisted valiantly. The difficulty that she had then, sometimes considerable, was the reason for the Gasguin’s delay in observing the great awakening that filled him with such joy. He, who shone primarily by virtue of his assimilatory capability, could not admit that his daughter had not inherited that. He did not have a sufficiently spontaneous mind accurately to measure the leaps, or rather the bounds in prodigious truth by means of which she often, without saying anything, and with expressions so distracted as to appeared stunned, she replaced the slow and steady tread of patient study to which he was obstinate in constraining her.

  So much patience in teaching and so much determination to learn, expended on either side and united in the result, had not, however, failed to bear fruit. The progress, too slow for her taste, obtained by Gasguin thanks to the ingurgitation of programs, and Geneviève’s interior leaps, which she jealously kept hidden from him, had ended up, in combination, by putting the student in possession of everything constituting the encyclopedia of present-day science, at least for the part dependant on Mathematics—which is to say, Mathematics itself, pure and applied, Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry and Mechanics. In seven years, the pupil had absorbed that formidable intellectual “bolus,” about which she was later to say, so modestly: “I learned it from my father, as from a feeding-bottle.”

  It is indubitable, in fact, that the meticulous, sure and perfect professor had “prepared” her, with every chance of success, not only for the two diplomas, which she could have passed hands down, but, doubtless better still, for the difficult entrance exams that form assaults upon the doors of the École Normale or the École Polytechnique, and perhaps even—as Yvernaux would one day claim—the competition for the most forcefully disputed doctorates.

  All that, it is necessary to say, and repeat as necessary, without Gasguin obtaining any suspicion of her genius, first reawakened and then in full expansion, especially in the last two of the seven years; all in silence, almost in hiding, without anyone in the world caching wind of a “leak”—primarily because Geneviève herself maintained the sort of mystery in which her work was accomplished. She kept the secret of her visions tenaciously, and that of her interior leaps as well, even against the potential curiosity of her father—and what interest had he invested in giving confidence to the little that he perceived of it?

  As for Geneviève’s purely scholarly progress, why should he have boasted about fulfilling his professorial task so well in that regard, having always been accustomed to fulfill it thus, for his other pupils as for his daughter? And to whom would he have boasted, anyway? To envious colleagues? Not to mention that, in the provinces, an overly knowledgeable demoiselle, who might qualify for diplomas concurrently with boys, was swiftly held up to ridicule. A future student, then? Gasguin was too bourgeois to present such an eccentric appearance, even if vanity had urged him to it.

  There only remained, as a possible “leak,” Aunt Line. Nothing to fear, therefore. What did she know? What could she have said? And even if she had known something, was not Aunt Line the tomb of all the family secrets? And was that not one of them?

  XXIII

  On one occasion, however—but how memorable!—Gasguin had had an almost irresistible desire to break his silence regarding Geneviève’s vocation, faith in which had returned to him at a stroke. He had almost yielded to the temptation, in spite of his terror of the scandal that divulgence of the fact that had restored his faith would certainly have caused a scandal, not only in the provincial world of Rennes, where he was then teaching, but, he imagined, the whole universitarial world, and perhaps even further afield. For the fact seemed to him to be of such a magnitude, at least in its consequences, to create a scientific stir “the world over,” as one says nowadays.

  It was a matter, undoubtedly, of an idea of authentic genius—what other word could one use, in all justice?—which had come to Geneviève, of which she had found the integral formula with the commencement of its practical application. She was then twenty-three years of age, in the middle of an arid period of more preparatory studies for the most recent syllabus in physical sciences, and had made her discovery without interrupting the conscientiousness of her studies or any lapse in her zeal as a disciple.

  That the discovery was important, Gasguin, as we shall see, could not be in doubt.

  He was then the only person in his entourage to know exactly what stage the question of wireless telegraphy, with which he had occupied himself with a special and even jealous care, had reached. In addition, he counted among the two or three physicists, at most, in possession of the very latest work done on the subject. It had been imparted to him, in fact, in an absolutely confidential manner by a letter received the day before, whose author was one of his former students at the Collège de Dinan, a young Englishman who had remained in scientific correspondence with him, and was now an assistant to the knowledgeable Cambridge professor, Monsieur Lodge.46

  This letter, locked in his desk, could not have been read by Geneviève. Even if she had read it, she would not have had time physically to write, after a summary reading, the rather long work that she submitted to her father that morning, without attaching any more importance to it than that to any other problem.

  “It’s quite interesting,” she had said, “because of the probable applications to be drawn from it, but no more.”

  Now, the conclusion of that work, which Geneviève had reached by a different route than that of the English physicist, was exactly the same as that of Monsieur Lodge himself, with an identical formula. As for the commencement of its possible application, it was indicated in Geneviève’s work, and there alone. The epistolary communication from the young Cambridge laboratory assistant had made no allusion to anything of the sort. And that application alone, in Gasguin’s judgment, could pass for a stroke of genius.

  The proof, moreover, that he was not being excessive in his judgment is that the same idea of practical application was found independently the following year, and became the parent idea of new theories due to Monsieur Bose and Monsieur Lodge—and then, mostly importantly of all, became the essential element of the famous Marconi system.

  It is only fair, nevertheless, to record here one important observation, which is that the idea put to work by these scientists was presented in Geneviève’s work in the state of a mere hypothesis. It would be quite unjust, on the other hand, not to note that the young scientist lacked a laboratory and the material means necessary to transform her hypothesis into a reality.

  Another proof, more convincing still, of the precious value that such work had in this era, was that one of its consequences, relative to the action of Hertzian waves on the metallic filings of Branly tubes, constituted the basis of the first paper published the following year by Gasguin.

  People familiar with these slightly abstr
use questions might recall the tenor of that paper, and especially the curious passage in which “ionization” is suggested as the probable source of those as-yet-inexplicable electrical manifestations.47 We shall not go into purely scientific details here, which would be out of place, but we have the right at least, and even a duty, to reveal them with regard to the paper and that passage on ionization; it was to them that the obscure petty provincial professor Thibaud Gasguin owed the resounding explosion of his celebrity.

  Certainly, Gasguin, in taking heed of the work that Geneviève had presented to him, had no suspicion of the magical result that was about to spring forth therefrom. One can understand, however, the very high value that he had immediately attached to it, the faith that he had recovered in his daughter’s marvelous vocation, and how glad he would have been, in spite of his bourgeois pusillanimity, to be able to cry out to someone:

  “She’s my pupil, and she has genius!”

  Not to mention the afterthought that had just, for the first time, occurred to him, and which would later take root, and grow increasingly, and finally, as we shall see, invade his heart a trifle excessively—which she ought not to hold against himself too much, nevertheless, given that it was perfectly natural and naïve: the idea, in sum, that he too might perhaps have genius! Would not the as-yet-vague consciousness of that “perhaps” be changed into certainty by the divulgence of the fact glorifying the pupil, and, with the pupil, in all fairness, the master?

  It was Geneviève, initially, and violently, who was opposed to that divulgence.

  “It isn’t worth the trouble,” she had said, “and I’d be ashamed of noise made for so little. Besides, since my conclusion, you say, is that of Monsieur Lodge, would he not accuse me of having stolen it from your correspondent’s letter? He and his master would be bound to do so, and appearances would be against us—against me, at least. Father, I beg you, don’t mention this to anyone! If anyone were to accuse me of having stolen someone else’s idea, I swear to you that I’d die of it.”