The Wing

by Jean Richepin

  Theoretically, the invention was nearly complete. So far as one could reasonably anticipate, from the parts already constructed and the admittedly-hypothetical plan of the remainder, there ought not to be any great difficulties to overcome in giving it a final form. It remained to put it into practice, of course, but the capital for that purpose would certainly not be lacking once the theory was declared viable. In any case, the value of the prize alone represented a sum of which Gasguin had not disdained to dream, on occasion, between his more beautiful dreams of glory.

  In the era when the Vaugirard laboratory was entirely occupied with the problem in question, Yvernaux had often said, delving deep into his lyricism:

  “When that patent is granted, it’s not just the empire of the Tsars that will have found its treasure; it’s Geneviève’s genius too, for that treasure will be the treasure of the war, no longer of potential but of fact, necessary to become the Napoléon of Science. For in potential, as we thinkers mean it, she already is. She would be in fact, if she had the means to realize all her dreams. Those means, beyond the most demanding expectations, she will have, thanks to the royalties automatically extracted by the patent from the inexhaustible wealth heaped up in the future granary of the world. I can see them now, those...”

  And he launched into veritably epic hymns, in which he soared in hectic flight above a magnificent panorama representing—and with what riches!—the high plateaux of central and northern Asia, once the cradle of the civilization from which ours emerged, becoming the throne of the future civilization to which ours is in the process of giving birth.

  To that tableau Aunt Line opened her eyes in ecstasy, as to a fairy tale. And Geneiève too, without any childish cupidity, but hiking about the opulent laboratory she would have, full of innumerable resources, permitting the costliest and most difficult experiments, putting the most chimerical ideas to the proof. As for Gasguin, ever the prudent Thiérachian, even in the wanderings of his most cherished hobby-horses, he invariably finished up saying: “Yes, on condition that the patent is solid and guaranteed, so that no one steals it from us!”

  On which Aunt Line intervened, remembering Grandma Hescheboix’s tales of invasion, to cry with her arms in the air: “Damn! Does one ever know, with these damned Cossacks always on the grab?”

  And the suspicion so well expressed thus, in a ludicrous form, was deeply ingrained in all those mistrustful Thiérachian souls, simultaneously peasant and Romany, for whom the worst shame is not to swindle someone else but to be swindled by him. Even Yvernaux, the sincere lyricist, could not help saying: “It’s certainly necessary not to let anyone pinch it, even for 65,000 bullets! That would be stupid, wouldn’t it, Geneviève?”

  He addressed himself to her with a sort of bashfulness that he had, in spite of everything, by virtue of thinking that he might have gone a little too far, but his scruple disappeared on seeing that even Geneviève was thinking along the same lines, for she said: “That’s why I’m leaving the idea at the planning stage. I’m like Aunt Line and Grandma Hescheboix, myself—I don’t get any odor of sanctity from the Cossacks. If they’re ever to be shown a paper on the intensive culture of arid soils, it should be with the patent in hand and guaranteed, as Papa wishes.”

  “Guaranteed,” added Gasguin, “by the French government.” Aunt Line nodded approvingly.

  And it is necessary to believe, finally, that even that guarantee had not been sufficient for their security, for they had indeed left the idea well and truly at the planning stage, in spite of the near-certainty of success and the lure of the roubles. They had rapidly forgotten it, in fact, a more fecund and more extraordinary idea having surged forth in Geneviève’s imagination, overexcited by the very recent discovery of radium.56

  That new idea astonished Gasguin excessively, in its breadth, and often made him regret having abandoned the previous one, more within his range. So, in spite of his mistrust, he had gone back to it from time to time, insinuating that it might perhaps be appropriate to present his theory of electrical fertilization—the theory along, magisterially enough to carry off the prize, while reserving the explanation of the practical applications subject to the acquisition and sure guarantee of the patent.

  But Geneviève had never yielded to these insinuations, absorbed as she now was by the other research projects to which she had, so to speak, fallen prey, so excited was she thereby. Prey, to be sure—and that was why she had been gripped by a kind of terror in their possession. That her secret, ready to be revealed, made her afraid to be the person to reveal it, to the extent of not wanting to be that person, one can easily understand merely by the pronunciation of the name—provisional as yet and rather obscure—by which she, by herself and solely for herself, almost tremulously, designated it: radioactive aviation.

  Those two words, taken separately, certainly have a sufficiently clear meaning—even the first, in its still almost-embryonic aspect as bicephalous and monstrous new-born. In combination, however, they take on a mysterious, incomprehensible and menacing air, pregnant with the seed of a progress whose explosion is imminent.

  You will have a better understanding in due course of that integral meaning, which is simple enough, without appearing to be at first glance, hidden by the matrix of the coupling that dresses them with absurdity. In that matrix, however, dense as it might be, and unopenable until further notice, the seam of unknown metal, the previously-unknown gem of the secret confided to Geneviève’s genius, can doubtless by divined. From the two conjoined words, it seems, even as they are, denuded of all present significance by their illogical amalgamation, mysterious miraculous effluvia already emanate, which explain the terror of the thaumaturge herself.57

  You can now take the measure of the real ardor, which had nothing feigned about it, that Geneviève must have put into ridding herself of that terrifying anguish, if only temporarily, by thrusting her father away and throwing herself back on to the old track of the Alexandra Prize. It was while clapping her hands, and in a sincere hope of success, with the involuntary autosuggestion of belief, excited by the mere fact of her energetic, imperative and iterative affirmation, that she had said: “Yes, I tell you that I can sense the solution to that problem, as if I already had it.”

  And everyone’s confidence had been captured effortlessly—Aunt Line’s blindly, Gasguin’s joyfully. Only Yvernaux had baulked at first, when he was told of the abrupt change of direction that evening. He had tried to inveigh against the lamentable intention to “let go” of what he called the “conquest of the gulfs”—“that divine prey”—in favor of “the palpability of roubles, that bourgeois shadow.” He had remained alone, however, with his “fanfares of lyricism”—as Geneviève had said to him, not without a certain acidity.

  In fact, she slightly resented the expression he had just used: “the conquest of the gulfs.” Did he not seem to be seeing clearly, by the light of his metaphor, into the very gloom of that mysterious and as-yet-obscure “radioactive aviation,” of which she had never even told him the name, for fear that he might find it a sufficient password? Yes, decidedly, as she had complained to Aunt Line the other day, he had already dreamed too much of it! And that too corroborated the resolution not to give any more thought to her great secret, in order that no one around her should think about it henceforth.

  But she knew, too, a continual torture, assiduous, obstinate and furious, nagging, stabbing and corrosive, as if vampiric, so atrocious that Dante had forgotten to put it in his Inferno, doubtless not wanting to remember it by virtue of having been too cruelly tormented by it. It was the torture inflicted on genius by obsession, jealously and exclusively extended in the implacable desire to have its whole due. It was necessary, as a kind of defense against that, also to extend herself in a perpetual effort of reason, incessantly trying, it seemed, to hold herself upright, like the flame of a torch amid gusts of wind, against eddies of folly.

  She succeeded even so, but not alone and by her own means. Perhaps, deprived
of help, she would finally have succumbed, the flame of her torch going out and her brain blown up like an empty bubble by the wind of dementia. It is only just to let it be known to what she owed the avoidance of catastrophe, which was, to all appearances, the two concomitant treatments administered by those two physicians of absolutely opposed opinion, the positivist Gasguin and the chimerical Yvernaux. At least, they both boasted about it after the fact. You shall see that Aunt Line, who never boasted about anything, also had something to do with it.

  At any rate, the story of that cure, as a possible contribution to a psychophysiological study of genius, is doubtless worthy of a momentary pause, however little one can sympathize at present with the patience of either or both of her two doctors, and also with Aunt Line.

  XXVIII

  You know in what good faith Geneviève had affirmed that she could sense the solution to the problem taken up again, as if she already had it. At the moment when she said that, she did, indeed “almost” have the vision. On the other hand, you will recall—and the explanation is not too difficult to see—that, “theoretically, the invention was very nearly” complete. It turned out, however, as things worked out, that that “almost” and that “very nearly” represented abyssal holes, whose crevasse could not be crossed, nor even its walls discerned.

  Geneviève had thrown herself into it, racking her brain, with her most audacious hypothetical thrust and her most powerful calculative motor, but she did not succeed in reaching the other side, nor in sending a sounding-line of light into the depths of its darkness. And those very images by which she involuntarily translated her impotence only provided further proof of the obsession whose victim she was.

  Her obsession, in face, which nothing could distract, poisoned all the best mental preoccupations applied to anything else, and tainted them, as it were, with the particular, exclusive and tyrannical appetite of its own preoccupation. In vain, the inventor, the physicist, the mathematician tried to absorb herself in the dogged study of electrical fertilization; she could not do it. Her brain was haunted only by hypotheses, experiments, equations, formulae and—as we have seen—even metaphors inspired by radioactive aviation.

  In spite of the prideful reluctance Geneviève had always experienced in admitting to an intellectual infirmity, she suffered so much from this one, and judged it so difficult to cure without help, that she was obliged to confess it—not merely to her old Aunt Line, with whom she abdicated all pride, but to her godfather, whom she feared might treat it as a joke, and even her father, which was particularly hard for her now.

  She now disliked humiliating herself before her father, as she had done so frequently as an adolescent. The excess of her discouragement, however, rendered any submission facile, even to the pedantic and meticulous authority of the professor from whom she had freed herself so long before. She even tolerated the pretentiously understanding expression he adopted—without wanting to offend her—in order to say: “I know these hauntings. All great minds are subject to them.”

  How could she not have endured even that haughty attitude, disparaging her genius by its familiarity? Gasguin was only adopting it in order to give her help, for he immediately added: “Alas, yes, I know the problem—but fortunately, I also know the remedy for it.”

  And she listened to him devotedly, drinking his words like a calming tisane.

  “Here it is—it’s very simple. It’s sufficient to resubmit one’s reason, pitilessly, to a discipulary regime. And that consists of a kind of hard labor, to which one submits the mind by methodical instruction in matters to which one is not accustomed. That exhausts and dislocates the mind, with exercises entirely new it, so that it takes on curvatures that stretch it, put to sleep and relax it. The obsession can no longer find points of support to work upon it. That’s always worked for me. Try it—you’ll see.”

  Yvernaux, when consulted, did not think the remedy bad, so it was tried—and not without results, it had to be admitted. Geneviève had already, several times in the distant and near past, purely for love of encyclopedic knowledge, dipped into other sciences than her favorite ones. Biology, in particular, had attracted her. She devoted herself to it again—particularly to medicine. A little relief was procured thereby.

  Nevertheless, Yvernaux observed, very delicately, might not the remedy work more forcefully if she had recourse to work antipodean—his own expression—to her customary tasks? In consequence, Geneviève might undertake the studies for which she thought herself least well-endowed—law and judicial procedure for example. Gasguin even conspired with Yvernaux—and the fantasist thinker thought that admirable—in an appeal to their old shared memories of the seminary in order to compile for their daughter and goddaughter a course in theology and casuistry.

  This time, it was a little too much, and, the jester that Geneviève sometimes was—as you have seen—waking up even in the invalid, she said to her godfather one day, slyly and cheerfully: “Oh no, you know! If it’s a matter of distraction for distraction’s sake, I’d rather recommence the little sessions in which you initiated me into the joys of the ‘displaced state.’ What do you think? Suppose we get rid of the obsession by drowning it?”

  This was only a joke, as you can imagine. Yvernaux, however, had suddenly seized upon it, as a marvelous idea, thanks to an association of ideas of which the following is the incredible but authentic history.

  Ordinarily, he would have smiled at his goddaughter’s banter. He did not even notice it this time, being in no mood to laugh, but having, on the contrary, a heart and mind full of black anxieties. Aunt Line, in fact, having taken him to one side before he went in, had only just said to him: “Listen, fieu—the ch’tiote is killing herself with these classes you’re forcing her to take again, you and her father. Leave that to Gasguin. You must give her back what she loves—but without her knowing it. Do you know what that is?”

  He had replied negatively. She had persisted, talking about the plant to be cared for, and “she who had been a plant in time gone by.” The matter remaining obscure to him, he had demanded further explanations. The old woman had gone on: “Well, what? Has she not a soul, in the utmost depths of the other, like mine—and which also thinks, and knows, and remembers as it sleeps? I can’t tell you any more, myself, but you know her well, that Geneviève of the underneath, where all the Hescheboix are! You’ve talked to her about it many times. You give it a funny name, though! That makes me laugh. I think it must resemble your ‘displaced state.’”

  It was very rare for Aunt Line to say as much as that in one breath. Such a flood of words testified to a profound disturbance. Her gaze, moreover, was unsteady and fluttering. And Yvernaux had abruptly realized that the poor old woman, the perspicacious old woman, the sublime old woman with the atavistic knowledge, wanted to make him understand something.

  “I’ve got it!” he had cried. “You think, don’t you, Aunt Line, that I ought to act upon her polygonal self?”

  “That’s it! That’s the word! As for the thing...”

  And the seeress, with the instincts of the Sphex, the memories dating from the high plateaux of Central Asia, the merlifiche for whom the stronger, more intense, more vibrant soul—almost the living soul—had been precisely the thing in question, the “simpleton” who could not explain herself better, had concluded her inexpressible thought with a gaze and a significant gesture as clear as words:

  The thing, the soul that I can’t name myself, the soul that you call by some more-or-less crazy name, polygonal, subliminal, subconscious, unconscious and other soubriquets, that soul, I have a better sense of what it is than you do; and it is, in Geneviève as in myself, the essential soul, the soul by means of which it’s necessary to cure the other, by drowning it.

  Now, what had been so clearly and so forcefully signified a little while before by Aunt Line, by means of her gaze and gesture, Yvernaux had not “heard” at the moment when it had been “said,” without actually being spoken—but in his “polygonal,” unco
nscious memory, it had been perfectly recorded, understood and expressed. And suddenly, his conscious self took possession of the fact thus recorded, understood and expressed. He had a clear notion of it in the abrupt association of ideas that the word “drowning” had released—the penultimate word of Aunt Line’s unspoken sentence and of the one spoken in jest by Geneviève.

  “Of course!” he exclaimed, as soon as the word had been uttered. “Perhaps you never said a truer word.”

  “What?” Geneviève replied. “you want me to start drinking again in order to drown...”

  “Drinking? No. But I think it’s necessary, to cure your conscious mind of its obsession, to drown it—yes, drown it—in the other. In more explicit terms, I’m saying that it’s necessary to give the obsession to your polygonal self, as fodder...”

  She closed his mouth with a furious: “Oh, no, I beg you! No Grassetian psychology just now! I’m truly suffering. I need consideration.”

  But he shouted loudly enough to make her ears ring: “That’s what Aunt Line thinks!”

  “Aunt Line? You’re crazy. What has Aunt Line to do with the polygonal self?”

  And there was a truly farcical scene between the two of them, one so great, the other so lyrical—until the moment when, with calm heads, with no shouting or misunderstandings, all was explained.

  And that farce had, for its very serious and no less original conclusion, the soon-victorious trial of a new treatment, combining Gasguin’s discipline applied to the conscious self and Yvernaux’s exaltation, reserved for the other, where the obsession continued henceforth. That was how Geneviève avoided the catastrophe. That was the salvation of her genius.