Soon, in fact, only the polygonal self was occupied with the obsession, which ceased to be unhealthy and tormenting, since it was no longer as neglected, seeking to avenge itself by means of an obstinate, corrosive, vampiric haunting. Meanwhile, the conscious self, exhausted by new exercises and reacquiring the notion of obedience therein, no longer had any need to lend itself to foreign matters. It had quickly recovered the free disposition of its faculties for its habitual studies—and thus the problem of electrical fertilization had ceased to conceal its possible solution from Geneviève’s patient attention and inventive imagination.
Before the historic conclusion of that strange new cure, from which two gestating discoveries were to emerge one after the other, it is worth making some less important but even more curious observations regarding the employment of propitious means for the favorable excitation of the polygonal self.
If one had the leisure to dwell on it, there would doubtless be material here of keen interest to philosophical physicians like Grasset, and even simple therapists in quest of remedies, not for individuals of genius, but for ordinary neuropaths. We regret being unable to give them ample satisfaction, but once more, we must limit ourselves to a very brief account of facts from which experts, and even amateurs of little-known sciences, might be able to draw fruitful conclusions, perhaps newly informative but, in any case, rich—one hopes—in a certain amusement.
You will not have forgotten that mention has been made—in chapter IV—of “special practices” to which Geneviève had recourse to put herself in a state of fecund but unconscious intellectual labor. She hid them even from Yvernaux himself. It was not therefore, him who had been able to reveal them to her, even partially. We know, nevertheless, and have “the authorization to let it be known” that these practices consisted of a veritable “gymnastics of the polygonal self” and that their principal agent was autosuggestion, after placement in ecstasy—there is no other word more explicit—obtained by an unusual employment of ambient electricity, and the absorption of certain drugs in the form of fumes.
Geneviève knew the power of the electrical bath in which we are always in flotation and which, in stormy weather, represents potentials measurable in thousands of volts. She understood the tenor of these potentials, with respect to the moments and direction of the electrical currents, their variations and the laws controlling those variations, well enough to be able to make use of them in many instances, and did so without the slightest scruple. That was, in many circumstances a pure and simple abdication of what we call free will. She experienced no remorse in consequence.
Even less was she ashamed of a kind of drunkenness, wholly of her own invention, which took the place of the one she had tried in vain with Yvernaux. Her godfather’s aperitifs, as he himself complained, could only be dangerous auxiliaries. Opium and hashish are slaves that quickly become abominable tyrants. Geneviève had found the true “motors of the polygonal self”—as she called them, privately—in a powder that she made up, and whose vapors she inhaled, drawing them into the depths of her lungs.
It was by chance that she had first become aware of the principal elements of that powder, a remedy prescribed got certain nervous troubles, whose formula she had found in an ancient pharmacopeia. By trial and error, she had arrived at the exact dosage she required. Dried plants, pulverized and rendered combustible by an adjunction of potassium nitrate, comprising various Solanaceae, noxious herbs once dear to witches making philters, such as Datura stramonium,58 poppy, henbane, belladonna, aconite, hyssop and star anise.
Perhaps the demi-revelation of these practical secrets will be considered an admission of voice, and will be injurious, in certain narrow minds, to admiration for Geneviève, but we did not believe, even so, that we ought to leave it out. Let us place the quasi-sacrilege under the safeguard, devoted to the point of adoration, of the mad but simultaneously wise Yvernaux, who seems to have found a definitive formula in a remark quoted above, which may serve as an epigraph for the present study:
“I affirm that true genius consists of exactly that conscious exploitation of one’s unconscious.”
XXIX
Novelists of the so-called “psychological genre” have tried too hard, all the same, to dismantle and reassemble the mechanism of the subtle clockwork by which they explain the march of our sentiments and ideas, in order to make our actions mark the hour of their choice. Others, whatever they call themselves, are of the no-less-agreeable party that collects “odd facts” and thread them on to the slightly coarse string of a supposedly-scientific determinism, aiming to render that incoherent Indian file logical. Perhaps the simple story-tellers have the right approach, in wanting to keep to the story and nothing more—but the worst portion of all is that of the conscientious historian, who seeks the humble truth humbly, by no matter what means, and most of the time fails to find it, and must then content himself with guessing it, and giving it at least an air of plausibility.
That is what we have tried to do in this study, and we want to continue to do it, even though the task is becoming increasingly unrealizable, sometimes to the point of impossibility. And is that not exactly the case here, where the truth, such as one believes that one is in certain possession of it, presents itself under the appearance of an implausible fiction, to the point of appearing as aggressive as a defiance of reason? Those interested in Geneviève’s genius will judge for themselves.
That Geneviève’s thoughts often rested the flight of its dreams on the memory of Joson had been demonstrated, and no one will be surprised by that. That the flight in question had brushed Joson’s soul, and had awakened dreams there too, is less easy to imagine. But that, by virtue of that thought and dream-flight, without either of them being conscious of any exchange, a sort of chain was gradually forged between their two beings, is something that many serious minds will probably consider a pure phantasmagoria.
We shall not waste any time trying to convince them of the error of their skeptical neophobia. We only ask them to reflect on the frightful wall of mystery that imprisons us on all sides and to which we never acquire the “Open Sesame.” We remind them of the miracle of the vital seed enclosed in an infusorium in a state of desiccation or in a seed placed between the lips of a mummy; merely enclosed, that germ is dormant but not dead, since life revives immediately when the desiccated infusorium rediscovers the fountain of youth of water or when the grain of wheat falls into the maternal bosom of the earth. We shall also mention to them the very recent marvels of wireless telegraphy, of which we know the how but not the why. And finally, we shall ask them whether there is not more of the unimaginable in any one of these thaumaturgies than in the simple telepathic fact—duly established, moreover—of two minds in communion across time and space.
And since the observation of such a fact is frequent and patent, authenticated by indisputable testimony, we shall not risk attempting an explication of it, which is, in any case, unnecessary. We shall accept the fact in itself and henceforth, without any fear of manifest implausibility and without any scruple, we shall give all the details, including the features that that are most strongly stigmatized by the fantastic.
We have sufficiently depicted, we believe—perhaps even overgenerously—the kind of spell, both amorous and mystical, cast upon Geneviève by all her memories of Kairnheûz and the mirages of her imaginary stained-glass windows. Nothing is more natural and more conceivable than that empery over a thirteen-year-old soul, entirely innocent and then subject to the only religious crisis of her life. Nothing is less unexpected, in consequence, than the impulse of that soul continuing to desire to fly toward the other, as if permanently magnetized in the direction of that pole.
What cannot be determined, however—for no one was conscious of the phenomena until long after their production—is how that magnetization had located that pole, and especially, how the pole had been influenced in its turn by the desires for contact extended toward it. It is therefore necessary to limit this reporta
ge to what it was possible to learn, by groping in profound obscurity and without any firm contact, now less than ever, about the why of a mystery, the how of which was so poorly understood.
When Joson had left for his first campaign as a naval officer, he had only a very vague impression of Geneviève in his conscious memory. The two months of his last vacation at Kairnheûz had been occupied, especially sentimentally, by other things than the soul of the little girl catechized by his tutor, about whom the Abbé had not told him anything very interesting. He had only seen her as someone with whom he went for walks, a being mingled with the ambience of those rather fleeting days that he had devoted to his mother, certain that he had devoted to them to her alone, uniquely and willingly.
Nevertheless, as always happens when one is absorbed by an exclusive sentiment, that ambience and the progress of those rapid days had been recalled by the young man’s unconscious memory. The photographic images therefore existed, ready for “development,” to employ an image that renders these reflexive phenomena more intelligible. Nevertheless, no opportunity arose to “develop” them, or even to suspect that those images existed somewhere, held in reserve and consigned to forgetfulness in a drawer of which Joson did not have the key, or even the knowledge of its existence.
Twice, however, that opportunity could have presented itself, quite naturally, it seems, on the death of the Comtesse and the death of the Abbé. The very violence of his grief in the two cases, however, and the intensity of the memories resuscitated by such deaths, prevented the image of any other individual from being evoked at those tragic moments.
Compared with his mother, whom he had cherished so tenderly and so profoundly—enough to have hated his father, perhaps to the point of thoughts of parricide and perhaps even to the point of the act, as some dared to allege—and with that figure filling all his heart, what significance could there be in the poor pale effigy of the girl whose dull expression had soon been effaced in the mists of the past? Even in his fond remembrance of the Abbé, his tutor for so many years, it had not occurred to him that she had been his catechumen. At the most, and without clearly distinguishing the features of the first communicant, he had seen in fleeting memory the shadow of a white dress pass over the priest’s black robe.
And that was all! The drawer with the images remained unopened; only a mist had emerged from it. That mist, that shadow veiling Abbé Denis Gasguin’s soutane with a light pale cloud, was all that Joson remembered consciously—and forever, one might have thought—of Geneviève.
All the more so, one can and ought to believe, because his life had been singularly agitated, vehement and adventurous, full of events liable to make one forget many things and many people. Not, of course, facts as capital as the drama with which his childhood had been entangled or the two great occasions for mourning by which his first year of youthful freedom had been so cruelly darkened, but much more so than his insignificant camaraderie of two months with the girl of whom his first thought had been neither more or less, as you might remember, than: “God, what an ugly little thing!”
Joson’s life, since his last vacation at Kairnheûz, is an entire other story—and how different!—which it would have been necessary to intercalate with the present story if we had wanted to narrate it, even in summary. Merely compiling the balance-sheet, limiting ourselves to the facts, without seeking any psychological substance or moral reflections, would have involved writing a veritable modern cape-and-épée novel.
We shall resist the temptation to amuse ourselves with that as lengthily as the subject-matter would permit. We ought not to be distracted any more than is necessary from the intellectual facts—certainly superior in interest—constituting the history of Geneviève’s genius. We shall nevertheless relate that which it is necessary to know for the sake of the history of that genius, and everything regarding the typical case of telepathy between her and Joson.
The forced amalgamation of the two stories, one of virtually pure philosophy and the other of pure adventure, will, in any case, prove once more to what petty causes the greatest effects are often due, and of what hazards the immanent logic that is claimed to constrain events is sometimes—not to say always—made.
XXX
Like many calculations “taking the long view” in which an overly complicated politics goes astray by virtue of being too clever, the calculation made over the Abbé’s head for or against Josdon’s future had been mistaken. Two essential elements, admittedly difficult to foresee, had been omitted therefrom: the death of the Comtesse so soon after her son’s departure and the no-less-prompt death of the Abbé after the Comtesse’s departure.
If his mother had lived another ten years, and the Abbé likewise, there is every reason to think, in fact, that Joson would have followed the progress desired by you know who across the chessboard of existence. Raised in the ideas and sentiments—principles or prejudices—that had earned him the nickname of the Little Chouan on the Borda, colliding head-on with the ideas and sentiments—also principles or prejudices—of the modern world, the high-minded gentleman would quickly have become disgusted, first with his career, and then the modern world itself. From that disgust to a desire, and then a need, for the tonic offered by religion, the passage was ready-made. A resignation would have brought him back to Kairnheûz. When his mother died, with the Abbé at her deathbed, having no more than a few decisive words to pronounce, the Company would have counted among its members Comte Elme-Cast-Jagut-Marie-Joseph de Ponhual-Plouër.
That the last descendant of an old and illustrious family was also, by courtesy of his maternal grandfather, a Hugon de La Goëlwec, in line to share in a future inheritance, perhaps considerable if he remained the only heir that it was possible to locate, the exquisite Abbé and the charming Comtesse were absolutely ignorant, but someone knew it in their stead and would have told Joson about it at an opportune and chosen moment—which is to say, in complete detachment from the perishable things of this world.
It so happened that the secret was revealed to the young man at a very different moment. As had been expected, there was then a violent break with an entourage to whom he remained too much the Little Chouan of the Borda, but disgust for the world in general had not taken hold of him, nor even for the modern world in particular. Far from it! And it was precisely because of that “far from it” that the revealer of the secret in question had hastened to make him party to it.
A shady businessman, a former chief clerk to the notary of the late Comte Alain-Mathias-Bertrand, that informant had been acquainted with Joson’s father during his last years of drunkenness and gambling. He had profited from the situation as a procurer of money-lenders, and even worse, if necessary—notably of dupes. Knowing the father’s vices, and foreseeing their emergence in the son, he had remained on the lookout for their possible germination, and had long despaired of seeing them born, but then had recovered confidence following the death of the Comtesse.
There had then been, in fact, a turbulent crisis in the life of the young naval officer, for some two years. Utterly firm in his opinions, but feeble in his conduct, pushing his religious faith to excess and a quasi-ostentatious extremism and scorning the most elementary morality, Joson had established himself as an intransigent Catholic in principle, but only that, and scandalous in his conduct. While awaiting all the vices of all the Ponthual-Plouërs, and even those of the Goëlwecs, to recover in him their splendid blossoming of yore, he allowed to flourish immediately and fully the paternal vices of the more recent past, in particular the two that were characteristic of his race: drunkenness and gambling.
It was that moment that the revealer of the secret of the inheritance had judged opportune and wisely-chosen to offer those vices the aliment that their maintenance lacked—for Joson was not rich, with the small portion of the Comtesse’s ill-conserved dowry that had been saved from the demands of the late Comte. That small amount and the price of the estate—yes, alas, Kairnheûz had been sold to the highest bidder
!—had soon melted away at the gaming tables and flowed over the counters of drinking dens during so-called convalescent leaves, in which the officer disgusted by his career was already getting a foretaste of his resignation.
The shady businessman had seen this business clearly, with both eyes. So, expecting considerable benefits for himself, he had brought his client a large and unexpected windfall with the revelation of the secret, and what he might get out of it. Guided by him—or rather, letting him act in his name—Hugon de La Goëlwec’s heir had one day, as the sole survivor of those having a right of inheritance, come into possession of a veritable fortune, amounting to some two and a half millions.
In spite of the deplorable accounts that valued his opinions—and also, one has to admit, his regrettable way of life—the Comte de Ponthual-Plouër could have taken advantage of these unexpected resources to find his feet again in a profession that he loved in spite of everything. The navy has been, since time immemorial, the refuge of rebels who are able, when the occasion arises, to obtain forgiveness for their so-called “anti-authoritarian” spirit by virtue of loyal service every-ready for heroism. The young officer’s name, the new state of his fortune and his professional capacities, unimpeded by his private vices, would have assured him a fine future in the career the two initial phases of which he had already completed.
He made a different decision. Two brief missions on land, in Senegal, had given him a taste for life in Africa, the exploration of savage lands, and the independence from authority that can be exercised therein. He had delighted his adventurous spirit and his appetites for battle therein, sensed his petrel’s eyes illuminate with folly and imagined the erne’s beak that served as his nose clacking with joy. He therefore handed in his resignation, not in order to enter the Company that had wanted him, but to organize a company of his own to beat a path through the bush, as a conquistador of the modern New World that is Central Africa.
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