The Wing

by Jean Richepin

  To begin with, Yvernaux had been obliged to promise no longer to play the herald with the loud-hailer, relentlessly singing the praises of Gasguin and his genius in the student cafés. One can imagine the secret satisfaction with which he made the promise and kept it.

  As for Gasguin himself, it was with a glad heart that he renounced his strutting attitude, his nature being little inclined to it, after all, and inclining instead toward the modest, unctuous and apologetic stances of his early education in Christian humility. Also humbly, and with a glad heart, without being asked, he thought it his duty to reveal to his “old brother” the secret that the latter had already deduced, but which he was pleased to receive from Gasguin himself. With a truly generous and noble effusion, which went as far as tears, the master had bowed down of his own accord before the genius of his pupil, in her presence.

  Geneviève had been embarrassed by that. With no less noble generosity, she had immediately restated things, simply as she saw them, as it was necessary to see them, as Yvernaux saw them henceforth, as they might be summarized once and for all in complete impartiality, with an indulgence toward Gasguin that was only slightly exaggerated. For that was what was invariably demanded of the best of judges in the best of circumstances—which is to say, Geneviève enlightening Yvernaux’s religion.

  All things considered, everything having been weighed accurately in the scales of the strictest justice, it remained given, without any possible dispute, that Geneviève had moments of genius, unconscious visions in which the solutions appeared to her, as if dictated to her by another self, of problems turned over repeatedly in her meditations. But it was patent, by way of compensation, that Gasguin had the art of submitting these problems to her, or preparing those meditations for her, and, once the solution had been found, of methodically constructing its origins, its progress, its conclusions and it consequences. And no one could doubt, either, the invaluable services rendered to Geneviève’s mind, even for her most spontaneous faculties of invention, by the rich provision of raw materials that Gasguin had heaped up there, with an order and clarity that multiplied their worth tenfold.

  The genius farthest reaching in its bounds—and Geneviève had that at certain times—is not unable to cohabit, often in excellent accord, with the wisest common sense, and one can see that such was the case in her, by virtue of the reflections that she made one day to Yvernaux, of which he took care to make a note.

  “It’s the association of ideas, sometimes bizarrely produced and without perceptible reasons,” she said, “that gives birth of godsends. The further apart from which ideas come together, above the abyss, unexpectedly, and outside of all plausibility, even in utter folly or absurdity, the more chance they have of being original. But it’s still necessary to have the ideas in order to associate them—and thus, it’s necessary to have a thoroughgoing knowledge of all the sciences. And it’s also necessary that one can check out the godsends born of these quasi-demented associations. Thus, it’s necessary that knows what one knows with the absolute certainty that only an integral, scrupulous, well organized, perfectly adjusted, logical education can give, with its connections always ready, its arguments always at hand, for encyclopedic and instantaneous consultation.”

  And that grave dissertation she had concluded with a note of humor:

  “The conclusion of this long speech, my dear and very equitable godfather, you have already deduced, haven’t you? It’s that, without her brave father for a professor and guide, your scatterbrain of a goddaughter, most of the time, perhaps even all the time, would be at grave risk of being a failed genius—which is to say, what you call, I believe, something like a wolf…a kind of wolf! Yes, let’s see...a marine wolf. An amphibian, eh! Ah—I have it…in brief, a loufoque.”51

  Yvernaux had been forced to yield to arguments of this sort, whose ingenious dialectic enchanted him. And finally, he had admitted, as one had to admit in his society, that Gasguin was to some extent—and in a certain fashion, retaining a sense of proportion—Geneviève’s collaborator.

  The severe Yvernaux would not go so far, however, as to qualify that collaboration as indispensable. Even less did he acquiesce in the opinion—which he declared to be ridiculous—according to which Gasguin would have been capable of obtaining on his own, as surely although more slowly, the results that Geneviève had attained effortlessly. And finally, no matter how obedient he was to his goddaughter’s suggestions, the godfather baulked and snorted, whinnying with indignation, when she claimed that she herself, reduced to her own means, would never have accomplished anything at all, save for the dreams of a poet.

  “But geniuses,” he cried, like an eagle, “in the sciences as in any other area, are nothing but poets.”

  “Yes,” she replied, “except that in the sciences, when they stick to dreams and do not have a foundation of facts beneath their dreams—which is to say, when they have no knowledge—they are like poets without words.”

  “Those,” said Yvernaux, “are sometimes the greatest of all.” One day, carried away by his oratory flow, he had even added: “Me, for example...”

  She had burst out laughing, then raised her arm into the air and cried: “You, Godfather? On the contrary—you’re nothing but words.”

  And the debate had finished in gaiety with these ripostes, like children playing tennis:

  “It’s when I shut up that my words are most beautiful.”

  “You don’t say, you old lyricist.”

  “With the respect that I owe you, my genius Goddaughter, you’re another.”

  “Another what?”

  “Lyricist, of course.”

  And that’s the truth, amon. Aunt Line would have pronounced, as a last sally, if she had known the word and could understand all it expressed. And that is also why, everyone in the house sensing in some manner that it really was the truth, including Gasguin, and none of the Thiérachians, all tainted to a greater or lesser extent with Romany blood, including Yvernaux himself, liking to be overgenerous with the truth—a secret treasure dilapidated as soon as it is no longer secret—with a common accord, as if by tacit agreement, they had acted in conformity with an old saying from their homeland, as “word pie.” They had not even said, but only thought with closed mouths, like Aunt Line:

  Vérité dins ch’treu cuit son v’nin

  Gayant qui la tait; qui pas, nain

  Ch’ti qui sais n’sait qu’s’il ne l’dit nin.52

  For it was definitely—whether they wanted to admit it or not—out of terror of the incongruous and scandalous lyricism in which one soars, and in order to hide it, that they had gradually and religiously fallen into complete silence outside the house regarding its mystery, the family secret. Certainly, no one had ever pronounced the key to the secret even in private. They had, nevertheless, lived as if that key, that qualification of lyricism, designated a blemish, a deformity or a monstrosity of which nothing must be known outside.

  Gasguin had, therefore, resumed the modest and humble appearance of the petty provincial professor, attributing his discoveries to the fortunate hazards of chance. He did not like to talk about them, as if he dreaded anyone overrating them. He gave every appearance of being a person henceforth devoid of ambition, whose destiny had been fulfilled in its entirety, truly complete, who would grow old in the bliss of his over-rewarded mediocrity. He had played the part without too much hypocrisy, in spite of the thirst for glory that continued burning away in him deep down, and which he hoped to slake again thanks to new marvels in embryo in the subterranean springs of Geneviève’s brain. But hush! Mouth shut, in the Thiérachian fashion of Aunt Line: Ch’ti qui sais n’sait qu’s’il ne l’dit nin.

  So, in his laboratory at the École Normale, with his pupils and assistants, as in the laboratories of colleagues glad to solicit his collaboration, he revealed nothing of his endeavors or his hopes. For fear of “leaks,” possible thefts of ideas, he only allowed his methodical but pedestrian mind to be seen. Soon—understandably,
with respect to a “lucky” success greater that he doubtless desired—people acquired the habit of saying, without any appearance of excessive malicious severity in his regard: “Oh, Gasguin—he’s finished! One lucky strike, exhausted now. Overdone anyway, eh?”

  As for Yvernaux, he had long since ceased his word-of-mouth campaign, his charivaris and his attempts to have rivals booed to the profit of his “old brother.” He even avoided opportunities to talk about him—which were, in any case, increasingly rare. The generations of students change quickly in the Quarter. Those of nine years before were far away now, professors, physicians, notaries or advocates in the provinces. And those of the present day no longer knew that Yvernaux had once been—in the night of time—Gasguin’s “apparitor,” or, for the Poly boys, his “tangent.” Most of them, save for the Xs, probably had no idea who Gasguin was.

  To be forgotten to that extent presumably gave the professor no pleasure, but Geneviève was delighted by it. The worthy but shameless Yvernaux had ended up seemingly profiting from it, resuming his professions of faith as a “lyrical thinker.” At length, in fact, all prudence—even the most Thiérachian—having gradually become unnecessary, the old student in his fortieth year, doctor of letters and proud of his famous “discipulary deanship,” had not been able to resist letting out a little of his secret, holding ajar the door to the mystery whose cage he was, but he did that without being aware of it, in the Thiérachian, or even the Romany mode—which is to say, for himself alone, others seeing no more than “something blue in the fire”53 as Aunt Line would have said.

  It was thus that in his brasserie, the environment propitious for the effusions of the thinker and the lyricist, he intoned hymns in honor of his goddaughter, of Geneviève, “magnifying” her and “litanizing” her genius, as we have seen. Except that it was in such a fashion that the goddaughter took on the appearance of a chimerical being, an “entelechy,” as he also sometimes put it. And no one, not even his two faithful followers, the former Fourierist turned apprentice mage and the Scandinavian Nietzschean, could tell what that Geneviève, that genius, was, nor even whether she existed other than in Yvernaux’s imagination when he was in the “displaced state.”

  In the Rue Malebranche, where their concierge spoke reverently about Monsieur Thibaud Gasguin “the scientist” and his daughter Mademoiselle Geneviève, no one knew that she too was “the scientist.” And finally, in the vicinity of the private laboratory in the most distant part of Vaugirard, she was assumed to be something akin to the servant of the mad old chemist doing dangerous experiments in a hut in the middle of an area of waste ground. And on the way from there to their home, they passed, as we have seen—she even more than her father—for caricatures of a sort, two grotesques.

  Thus, save for imbecilic jokes and the ramblings of a drunkard, Geneviève, in the eyes and mind of the public, was really “non-existent.” She was dead at the precise moment when the present story began, to the extent that she had not even been given an obituary footnote by Sextius Costecalde. And yet, the strange quasi-absurd work to which that genius was frenetically applying itself and whose goal it foresaw, had what was necessary, if successfully completed, to revolutionize the world. Alone in the world, her genius knew that the secret could be realized. The conclusion of the experiments in progress, in which Gasguin was incubating hope as in a monstrous egg, without yet discerning what form the hatchling would take, while Yvernaux divined in that hatchling the eagle of the new age, was only possible thanks to Geneviève.

  At the thought that the egg was close to hatching, however, one might have thought that she was now afraid. The silence maintained for some nine years around her mysterious new research, around the very name of Gasguin, around her and by virtue of her own wishes—that silence unpenetrated thus far and doubtless impenetrable—seemed to her more profound and isolating as the walls of a prison. For the other day, face to face with Aunt Line, she had suddenly said to her, shivering from head to toe: “My father has seen too much of it. My godfather has dreamed too much of it. Sometimes, I no longer to want to be the person who will know what remains to be known.”

  Aunt Line, without any plausible reason for shivering except that her ch’tiote was shivering, also experience a frisson in her old flesh, and had demanded: “Why is that?”

  And Geneviève had immediately replied: “To be certain of ne l’dir’nin.”

  Then, with a shrug of self-disgust, she had added, swiftly: “No, that’s a lie. That’s not the reason. I would like not to be the person who will know because I’m a coward, because I have an idea that knowing it will do me harm.”

  XXVII

  The day after that critical day, she had given the excuse of not feeling well in order not to go to the Vaugirard laboratory with her father. He had been amazed, almost to the point of being indignant.

  It was the first time since they had had the laboratory that she had missed a session there. Even fatigued and suffering, during attacks of neuralgia, by which she was often tortured, or the high fever of influenza, she had never done such a thing. Her absence was even less excusable today because it was necessary to finish a whole series of complicated experiments with one last, fairly simple operation, the results of which promised to be definitive and to render the entire series conclusive.

  On the slightly harsh observation that he could not help making, she had become annoyed, and had replied to him in an even harsher tone, with an insolence to which he was unaccustomed: “Do it yourself, on your own, if you want. I don’t want to. I don’t scent it.54 If you do, so much the better for you. And then, enough! I don’t want to. I don’t want to do it anymore.”

  And she had shut herself in her bedroom, slamming the door nervously. This behavior was so new to her father that he had forgotten is amazement, then his indignation, and had been gripped by a runaway anxiety, thinking that she was very ill. He talked about sending for a doctor. Aunt Line, insolent in her turn, had put him off, saying in response: “She’s no more ill than you or me. What she needs isn’t a doctor, but to be left in peace. You’re getting on our nerves! Yes, me too. You know that you don’t understand ‘scents’ at all. Go away!”

  He had gone away, crestfallen, had had not dared to go to carry out the final operation on his own, fearing that Geneviève would be offended if the work were completed without her. If she doesn’t scent it, he thought, best to wait.

  That was precisely what he said to her when he went back, cajoling her instead of irritating her further—to which Aunt Line had deigned to pay attention, congratulating him on not being such a bad “sniffer” when he had gone to get a little fresh air.

  Geneviève, jumping on the good excuse thus furnished, had claimed that she had now ceased to “scent” not merely the operation still to be attempted, but the entire series of experiments already made.

  When Gasguin objected, very timidly this time, that it was a pity “to give up on…” she had no even let him finish his sentence and had contented herself with nailing him to the spot with an authoritarian stare the instructed him peremptorily not to persist, or even to continue. And the poor man, having swallowed his words and his saliva, had shut up.

  “Good,” Aunt Line had approved. “That’s how it ought to be between the men and us, amon! It’s the only way—we don’t talk, they don’t talk back.”

  The old woman’s condescending manner was so comically pretentious that Geneviève had smiled. Disarmed, therefore, and to offer Gasguin some consolation for his discomfort, and also to give herself a valid reason for deserting the work on the threshold of success, she had had the sudden inspiration of offering him, and herself, the bait of another task.

  “What I can ‘smell,’” she had said, “as if it were already complete, is our solution to the machine for electrical fertilization.”

  She had stressed the “our,” which was more accurate in this instance than others, for that idea was “almost” Gasguin’s—at least, he had furnished, a long time ago, the
fist clear outline of it.

  That went all the way back to the era of the second paper, the “Note on the transmission of force by telluric currents.” When the Note was drafted, Geneviève had regretted a lacuna relating to the quantity of “positive ions” present in the air in placed where the earth has just been plowed on stormy days. Gasguin had then filled in the lacuna, instantly, by means of a meticulous calculation giving the probable voltage of that potential. And from that he had, as a sure logician, deduced the formula from which the idea had subsequently emerged from Geneviève’s creative breath the idea of “electrical fertilization.”

  This is not the place to explain the idea in detail. There would be a risk of distorting it in a hasty explanation, especially without the necessary expertise. Perhaps the little that had just been said is already too much, its very brevity making it seem more obscure. It has only been mentioned in order to show why the matter ought to have been particularly dear to Gasguin.

  It is necessary to add—in order that it regains all the importance that had once inflated it—that he had momentarily nourished the hope of being, with that possible invention, a serious contender for the Alexandra Prize funded by the Imperial Agronomic Institute of St. Petersburg. You will certainly be familiar with that prize,55 less famous than the Nobel Prize but older and almost as valuable, since it is 25,000 roubles. It is designed to recompense, every five years, the author of the best work, both theoretical and practical, on “the intensive culture of arid soils.” It is easy to deduce that the prize’s funders had in mind the great desert spaces of central and northern Asia, which comprise two thirds of the empire of the Tsars, and which might become, if subjected to exploitation, the world’s granary and Russia’s treasure.

  Now this is what Geneviève’s idea amounted to, explained in summary. Thanks to an original combination of the transmission of force by telluric currents and electrolysis, the need for chemical fertilizers could be eliminated, and that of their transport, always costly. They would be replaced by the production at a distance of positive ions and negatively-charged electrons, the former in the air and the latter in the ground, by means of which the most arid soil might be fertilized without the great expense of industrial establishments or railways.