André Couvreur
The Necessary Evil
translated, annotated and introduced by
Brian Stableford
A Black Coat Press Book
Introduction
Le Mal nécessaire by André Couvreur, here translated as The Necessary Evil, was originally published by Plon, Nourrit & Cie. in 1899. It was the author’s first novel, and provided the foundation stone on which his future literary career was built. It was advertized as the first volume of a trilogy collectively entitled Les Dangers sociaux [Social Dangers], and was soon followed by two sequels, Les Mancenilles [a noun improvised from the specific name of Hippomane mancenilla, a highly toxic shrub] (1900) and La Source fatale [The Fatal Source] (1901), the former dealing with the threat posed by syphilis and the nexus of infection maintained by the prostitutes of Paris, and the second with the perils of alcohol abuse.
After completing his first trilogy, Couvreur began a second, collectively entitled La Famille [The Family], with La Force du sang [The Strength of the Blood] (1902) and La Graine [The Seed] (1903),which he was due to complete with Le Fruit [The Fruit] (1906). Before finishing the third volume, however, he digressed into fiction of a very different sort by producing another, very different, sequel to La Mal nécessaire, featuring the same protagonist: Caresco, surhomme, ou le voyage en Eucrasie: Conte humain (1904; tr. as as Caresco, Superman; or, A Voyage to Eucrasia)—a rare example of a boldly fantastic sequel to a grimly naturalistic work, all the more exceptional because of the existence of the two thematic sequels that already existed.
Couvreur might have considered that unusual move necessary because, unlike Les Mancenilles and La Source fatale, in which it is very obvious what the “social dangers” featured therein are, Le Mal nécessaire does not make it entirely clear exactly what its featured social danger is. By comparison with syphilis and alcoholism, the ineffectuality of institutional control of medical practice seems a minor issue, even if one considers that it permits the occasional dangerous individual to wreak havoc. In Caresco, surhomme, the social danger ostensibly posed by the kind of thinking and ambition that Armand Caresco represents is made luridly and hyperbolically clear, in a fashion at which its Naturalistic predecessor could only hint obliquely.
As things turned out, the supplementation of Le Mal nécessaire by Caresco, surhomme was a sign of things to come. Although Couvreur did go on to complete his second trilogy with Le Fruit, the core of his subsequent literary work consisted of a series of speculative novellas dealing with potential developments in biotechnology, credited to one Professor Tornada. Tornada began his career as a markedly different character, but soon assumed Caresco’s extraordinary surgical skills and various other aspects of his paradoxical character, eventually deciding to term himself “the Superman,” just as Caresco had, and embarking on a large scale project of social engineering analogous to, but very different in ambition from, the one adopted by Caresco in Eucrasia.
The present volume is the first of five, and will be followed by Caresco, Superman and three volumes collecting the entire Professor Tornada series, collectively entitled The Exploits of Professor Tornada. Within that context Le Mal nécessaire is something of a generic anomaly, but it also the essential seed from which the entire complex and bizarre literary edifice germinated, and is vital to a proper understanding of the growth and metamorphosis of a remarkable sequence of works. In the course of that sequence, Couvreur returned again and again to the idea of “necessary evil” first sketched out in the present novel, treating it both as a curious phenomenon to be studied and as an acute problem to be elaborately explored in various thought-experiments, with a view to a deeper understanding of the assumed necessity.
“André Couvreur” was born in 1863 at Seclin in the Nord; his baptismal name was actually Achille-Émile-Henri Couvreur, but he signed his early literary works, all of which were intended for the theater, “A. Chils,” adapting his Christian name. The first production that was staged, in Lille in 1885, appears to have been a farce entitled Ipéca et Cuana. It is now difficult to determine whether any others were produced prior to Le Secret de Polichinelle [The Secret of Polichinelle, that being the French equivalent of the English puppet character Punch], a satirical play in verse staged in 1893, which appeared in print in the same year under the extended pseudonym of “André Chils.” No further theatrical endeavors achieved print publication, but at least one other was produced thereafter: La Consultation [The Consultation] (1914, credited to A. Chils). The author retained the André, however, when he began to use his own surname instead of the improvisation
By the time Le Secret de Polichinelle was produced, Couvreur had qualified as a physician, receiving his degree in 1892, slightly belatedly, perhaps because he had been pursuing his literary ambitions in parallel with his studies. His doctoral thesis explored the relationship between pulmonary tuberculosis and tubercular tracheobronchial adenopathy. His father and older brother were both doctors, and he had doubtless been encouraged to follow in their footsteps, perhaps a trifle reluctantly, but it must have been obvious by 1892 that medicine offered him better opportunities to make a living than literature, and he doubtless made a firm commitment to make a decent living when he married in 1893. Obviously, however, he never surrendered his literary ambitions, and when his novels began to appear he was quick to become an active member of the Societé des Gens de Lettres as well as maintaining his medical endeavors.
The 1890s must have seemed a good time to begin writing novels set in the world of medical practice, which was becoming a fashionable literary topic, aided by the abundant publicity given to the medical advances it was hoped that intensive scientific research—like that carried out at the Institut Pasteur, founded in 1887—might soon produce. Michel Corday, with whom Couvreur was later to collaborate on the speculative novel Le Lynx (1911; tr. in 1913 as The Inner Man), had caused something of a sensation in 1894 with his novel Le Cancer [Cancer], which had broken new ground in its consideration of the psychological and social effects experienced by its protagonist after receiving the diagnosis of his condition.
Léon Daudet had caused a sensation of a different kind in the same year with his scathing satire on the medical profession in general and surgeons in particular, Les Morticoles [a slang term for doctors, approximately decodable as “death-sowers” by analogy with agricoles (agricultural workers)]. Daudet was prompted to write the latter novel by his resentment at failing the internship that would have completed his medical qualifications; although Couvreur was writing defensively from inside the medical establishment rather than attacking it from outside, and his novels are therefore essentially antithetical to Daudet’s, Le Mal nécessaire does have concerns that overlap those of Les Morticoles, being similarly suspicious of the tendency to arrogance exhibited by avant-gardist surgeons, and is certainly not devoid of scathing sarcasm.
There had, of course, been numerous other novels featuring adventurous surgeons prior to Le Mal nécessaire, some of which had even dared to broach such potentially-shocking topics as the methodology and occasional necessity of hysterectomies, but none had ever offered such an explicit—not to say flamboyant—depiction of an operation of that sort as the one in Le Mal nécessaire, and none had ever imagined a situation akin to the moral dilemma in which Caresco’s assistant eventually finds himself, as a result of the surgeon’s rather original perception of such a necessity. When one considers the immense diplomatic care exercised in the handling of gynecological topics in Faiseur d’hommes [Maker of Humans] (1884) by the dutifully pseudonymous “Yveling RamBaud and Dubut de Laforest,” one can easily appreciate the contemporary shock value of the brutal frankness of Couvreur’s novel.
Couvreur’s depiction of Caresco’s
surgical exploits, with particular reference to young women, was by no means without precedent, but much of the relevant precedent had been contained in a literary tradition that extended back through the contes cruels and romans frénétiques of the Romantic Movement to foundation stones laid by the Marquis de Sade. Couvreur was not a pornographer—although he probably attracted a few accusations to that effect when he wrote Caresco surhomme and the second and third Tornada novellas—but there are subtle literary affinities between Le Mal nécessaire and Sade’s most notorious works, which help to make it a discomfiting book, even though its narrative voice adopts a conscientiously horrified attitude to the nasty things it describes, and the sympathetic characters featured in the novel are dutifully extreme in their moral conservatism.
Caresco’s most evident literary precursor is Dr. Gael in Louis Michel’s Les Microbes humains (1886) and Le Monde nouveau (1888),1 who is introduced as a conscienceless researcher casually carrying out experiments in human vivisection and surgical modification, but is ultimately recast as a physical and intellectual superman whose discoveries might enable humankind to take a great evolutionary leap forward after the cataclysm that is scheduled to destroy the corrupt capitalist world order. Couvreur was at the opposite end of the political spectrum to the anarchist Michel—although not as far to the right as the position Léon Daudet eventually took up—and it is possible to read the two Caresco novels as a critical counterblast to the idea that a surgeon like Gael could possibly be regarded as a hero, especially if he could change the world in conformity with his utopian ideals. Caresco, however, certainly adopts that view of himself.
In spite of his flagrant disapproval of Caresco’s morality and alleged madness, Couvreur remains willing to give his views serious consideration, and to explore their potential in a manner that refuses simply to write them off a priori merely because they are tainted with megalomaniac delusion. Indeed, the remainder of Couvreur’s writing career continued that exploration, always exercising a mind that, if not fully open, was at least ajar. Professor Tornada made his literary debut as a raving mad mass murderer, but by the end of his frankly paradoxical “career,” he was being affectionately addressed by his hapless friends as “Old Nada” and doing his sardonic best to make a world that he judged to be utterly corrupt and essentially irredeemable a slightly better place.
The ultimate balance of the initial assessment of Caresco’s maneuvers featured in the plot of Le Mal nécessaire undoubtedly surprised many of the novel’s contemporary readers and might well have shocked some, and that is one of the things that makes the novel exceptional and interesting. It would be inappropriate to say more about the plot here because it would work as a spoiler, but I shall add an afterword offering some further comment on the highly unusual nature of the story’s conclusion, and its relationship to the further development of Couvreur’s extended contes philosophiques, as featured in the other four volumes of this series of translations
This translation was made from a copy of the Plon, Nourrit edition, identified on the cover as the third edition but presumably identical otherwise to the first.
Brian Stableford
Preface
Certain malign minds are bound to try to put a name to the physiognomy of the protagonist of this book. The author wishes to declare, right away, that he has not written a roman à clef and has not depicted any real individual.
However, although the character traced in the following pages does not exist, he could exist. The beneficent power that the law accords to the scientific elite could, in other hands, become a veritable danger, and it would only require a disequilibrated brain to render real a fictitious case, to animate an improbable story.
The interest of this study thus resides in the critique of power without control with which our society invests certain individuals. The author would declare himself to be perfectly satisfied if a philosophical idea were to emerge from his work.
A.C.
THE NECESSARY EVIL
CHAPTER I
On a warm morning in the month of July, Madame Bise, the owner of the Château des Bolois, near Gaillon in the Eure, was installed in the small chalet that her late husband, Monsieur Bise, a section president of the Conseil d’Etat, had built on the edge of the lake. By her side, her sister-in-law, Madame de Jancy, sitting in a large wicker armchair, was busy with some trivial needlework.
There was a fundamental contrast between the two women. While Madame de Jancy, simple and gentle in appearance, with a bountiful expression engraved on her features, conserved a moderate, patient and tranquil demeanor in all circumstances, a noble reserve of gesture and movement attributable as much to her prefect distinction as to the dread of overstressing a weak heart, Madame Bise, on the contrary, manifested an exuberant, nervous and domineering character that penetrated her slightest attitudes.
Madame Bise was a small woman of about fifty, originally from the Midi, whose accent she was unable to lose, with a figure that was still slim and a face as dry and wrinkled as a rennet apple, in which the gray-green eyes had an extraordinary mobility. Originally Henriette de Jancy, she had married late and had not been able, in spite of legitimate efforts, to have children. Thus, she had an authoritarian attachment to her two nieces, her heirs, Madeleine de Jancy, the daughter of her late brother, and Aline Romé, who lived with her parents in a château in Les Andelys, not far away.
Every year, in summer, Madame Bise invited Madame de Jancy and Madeleine to come and spend a few months at Les Bolois. In truth, that holiday was not entirely enjoyable for her relatives, but the prospect of an inheritance imposed such a sacrifice. Madame de Jancy submitted to it in the interests of her daughter, to reestablish a fortune that her husband’s follies had diminished.
While the two ladies occupied themselves variously in the cool tranquility of the lakeside dwelling, nature completed her awakening outside. The whinnying of horses, the calls of gardeners, the chirping of birds in the large trees, the squeaking of a wheelbarrow and the leap of a carp in the water—distant and vague noises, muffled echoes—manifested external life.
Through the broad doorway of the summer-house, opening on the same level as the silvery expanse of water, a clump of trees was perceptible in the distance, in a gap in the landscape, beyond which golden fields extended. Three hundred meters away, the château loomed up, with its slate-roofed turrets shining in the sun.
It was only nine o’clock in the morning, but the implacable sun, without a caress of wind, was already filling the air with heavy warmth, stupefying the great trees in the park, and eating into the grass of the lawn, which had almost disappeared in places, dead for want of water. A gray mist, the last alms of freshness that the morning gave to the heat of the day, was completing its evaporation, still tinting the woody horizon with a veil ripped by broad golden sunbeams.
Madame de Jancy raised her head, put down her work and asked her sister-in-law: “Do you know where Madeleine is?”
“Probably at the gardener’s cottage,” Madame Bise replied. “She must have gone to see Mahu’s child. Can you understand why she’s always hiding with those people?”
“Madeleine loves children,” said Madame de Jancy. “Her dream is to get married, in order to have children, to care for them, to coddle them...”
“What! You’re not thinking of marrying her off already! She’s very young, the little darling. And then, don’t you think, my dear, that she’s not been very well for some time.”
“Yes…perhaps. I’m not anxious, though.”
“It’s necessary to look after her, the poor thing.”
Madame de Jancy responded with a vague but reassuring gesture. However, and although she was familiar with the range of the illnesses that tormented her daughter, she was saddened, deep down, to see the stigmata of a nervous disorder that the child had inherited from her father reappearing, after two years of perfect health. A wrinkle of anxious reflection furrowed her brow.
She remembered Madeleine’s agitate
d childhood, the convulsions of her infancy, the threats of meningitis, and, above all, the attacks of nerves that had arrived as soon as the woman had revealed herself within the girl, on the day of Monsieur de Jancy’s death. What pain and fear she had experienced when, running in response to the fearful appeal of a chambermaid, she had found her daughter prey to contortions. She had thought her doomed, poisoned, and had wondered if she could survive a double mourning.
Fortunately, Dr. Cartaux, an old family friend, who had witnessed the end of the crisis, had hastened to reassure the poor mother, by telling her that the malady, so terrible in its appearance, was not really very dangerous, and that it was curable by a course of treatment. Indeed, careful hygiene, prolonged hydrotherapy and a calm life, exempt from worldly excitations, seemed to have reckoned with the alarming phenomena, and for two years, Madeleine had been showing all the signs of radiant health.
However, a certain nervousness of character persisted: abrupt mood changes, a sensory hyperesthesia, and sometime also an inexplicable depression that lasted for entire days. In those symptoms Dr. Cartaux recognized the latent continuation of the malady. The nervous disorder was brooding beneath the ashes, and a counter-offensive was to be feared one day or another. He had even observed abrupt attacks of catalepsy in similar patients among his clientele, whose general health had not deteriorated.
Madame de Jancy wondered what new provocative element could be stirring her daughter’s soul, to cause the reappearance of those alarming symptoms, precursors of more serious disorders. She watched over her child with a vigilant tenderness, extended beneath her footsteps a carpet woven from calm and kindness, and sheltered her from exciting reading matter. She had not noticed anything in the simple routine of her family life that could have had a harmful influence on Madeleine’s health.
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