The Necessary Evil

by André Couvreur

  “What, then?”

  “What divine poet has said that people need to speak to understand one another? Hasn’t Baudelaire celebrated the mute canticle of the eyes?”3

  “You’ve sung that canticle?” said Aline. “Where?”

  “Last Sunday, in church, while the curé of Les Bolois was singing mass.”

  “Little minx! Is it to that that you devote the hours destined for the good Lord?”

  “I believe that it’s the best means of praying to Him.”

  “You’re right.”

  “So,” Madeleine continued, “he had learned that I go to the eleven o’clock mass every Sunday. Just between us, I don’t think he’s very pious—and then again, it was the opening day of the season, and I knew that he’s very fond of hunting, so I scarcely expected to see him. Well, he was there anyway. I’ve been so happy, so happy, my dear!”

  “And did he speak to you?”

  “He didn’t dare. It’s also necessary to tell you that I wasn’t with Maman—you know that she still has heart trouble, which flares up from time to time. So she was suffering, and had entrusted me to the chambermaid. That’s probably why he didn’t dare come over. He’s very discreet. But he had a bouquet of violets, which never quit his lips throughout the service.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know because, although I appeared to be very absorbed in my meditations, I never took my eyes off him.”

  “You’ll tell that to your confessor?”

  “I’ll tell him...later. So, I followed him with my eyes and I saw him with that bouquet—which he’d evidently picked himself, because the flowers were very badly tied—always raised to his lips, and that caused me a delightful emotion. Anyway, you know what it’s like, since you...”

  “Oh, me,” said Aline, in a tone that implied: I’m already blasé about such matters. “And then?” she continued, with a little sigh.

  “And then, when the mass was finished, as if by chance he left the bouquet on his seat, which was one of those on the edge of the middle aisle, in such a way that, as I passed by on the way out, behind my maid, I only had to bend down slightly to pick it up. If you’d seen his joy, when he saw me come out of the church in possession of his violets!”

  “How did he manifest his joy?”

  “With a flourish of his hat—but if you’d seen that flourish!”

  Aline uttered a giggle, which she quickly suppressed in response to Madeleine’s alarm.

  “You don’t believe that he loves me?” said the latter. “Oh, if you knew the splendor of my dream! To marry that handsome fellow, to live in profound, absolute happiness...to have children that resemble him!”

  Aline shrugged her shoulders. But the young women’s conversation was interrupted. They had arrived at the house. In the vestibule the greetings were still going on. Madame Bise was introducing her doctor to Monsieur and Madame Romé.

  Monsieur Romé looked at Caresco attentively, faithful to the inquisitorial habit of magistrates. He noticed the fleeting gaze and his first impression was unfavorable to the surgeon. He held out his hand, but was surprised to find a hand that also fled, which abandoned itself weakly, indifferently, almost limply, reflecting a profoundly egotistical heart. The man of the world and the professional were able to get the upper hand, however, and conceal the traces of astonishment and suspicion. In a level voice he expressed his delight in making the acquaintance of such a celebrated scientist.

  Then there was the lunch, banal and heavy, with all the heaviness of the weather. Conversations died as soon as they were begun, stifled by the heat. Madame Bise drank a great deal. Three times a domestic replaced the carafe of wine in front of her.

  Caresco, by contrast, hardly drank anything. At a certain moment, he was able to extract his neighbors from their torpor by telling them about one of his operations. He was very interesting as soon as he broached such a subject, knowing how to accommodate himself to the scope of ignorant minds. His eyes then implanted themselves with an extraordinary persistence on the person to whom he was talking and whom he wanted to convince.

  In the present instance, it was for Aline that he deployed the elegance of his talk, and Madeleine found herself relieved of the malaise of finding the man’s attention weigh upon her. By contrast, Aline did not take her eyes off him, seemingly riveted by him.

  As he spoke, clearly and eloquently, even Monsieur Romé sensed the repulsion that he had felt at first evaporating. Evidently, he was in the presence of a superior man. The surgeon was giving details regarding the organization of his clinic, the service of his nurses—the good sisters, whom he never tried of praising—and the mortality figures consecutive to his interventions.

  “I have no more than a three per cent mortality rate,” he said, “and yet I carry out improbable operations, notably all the operations on the liver of which I’m the pioneer.”

  Three per cent! Madeleine had heard, however, that there were many deaths at his sanitarium, that there had once been several interments at the same time, which had filled the little street into which the dead were brought out with an unaccustomed animation. Aline had told her that—the same Aline who was now listening to the surgeon with an interest that she was not accustomed to show.

  “Three per cent is very low,” said Monsieur Romé. “I thought the statistic was generally much higher.”

  Caresco protested. It was indeed higher among the other surgeons of Paris, the Official ones, who operated badly, without neatness, without surety, and with desperate slowness.

  “But the surgeon Monant,” said Monsieur Romé, “is reputed to be a skillful man. He operated on the wife of one of my friends, on an abdominal tumor, and the operation was a perfect success.”

  “That was luck,” proclaimed Caresco, “for Monant is one of the sorriest operators the French school possesses. He takes an hour and more to do what I do in five minutes. He’s maladroit.”

  That was his method: extravagant, continual denigration of everyone and everything. The sown seed always gave birth to something. Enough of those bad seeds had been thrown to the wind in his own direction!

  Madame Bise approved with a nod of her head, seeming to comprehend. She was waiting for an opportune moment to throw into the conversation a remark that she always put in when she brought her protégé to talk to people who did not know him.

  “Tell Monsieur and Madame Romé about the little girl from Étampes.”

  Caresco narrated the story, told a hundred times before, about a peasant girl from Étampes who, having climbed a tree one day to pick cherries, lost her balance and unfortunately fell into a hedge. That hedge was maintained at intervals by stakes, solidly-planted in the ground and pointed, with the result that the child, falling on to one of them, was literally impaled. The wooden stake had entered her buttock and penetrated all the way to the middle of the back, so profoundly that the girl was suspended in mid-air and it was necessary to saw through the stake to get her down from that painful situation. In that state she had been brought to his operating theater, and you can imagine the great dilapidation of the flesh that was necessary to rid it of that unfortunate foreign body.

  “And she was healed, Doctor?” asked Aline, decidedly very interested.

  “She was healed…naturally. But the most amusing part of the story is that, a few months later, she brought me her piece of the stake in a superb velvet case, asking me to keep it in memory of her. I exhibit it in my display-case, in the midst of my anatomical specimens.”

  There was laughter, and Madame Bise laughed more loudly than the rest. It was cheerful, like the intervention of the comedian in a drama. Armand Caresco, when he was in society, possessed to a supreme degree the art of modifying the horror of his surgical exploits by means of an innocent wit. He extended over them a veil of humor, like a tailored crepe in the mantle of a mourning-costume. He knew that it rendered them less terrible, dispelling from their atmosphere of cutting anxiety the apprehension that brewers of blood invol
untarily provoke.

  And while the anodynely macabre jokes followed the evolution he had indicated, he resumed his observation of the guests. How rarely was he able to take his place at a family dining-table in this manner! Intimacy only existed for him in the home of his plump mistress, and was then often troubled by the comings and goings of strangers, the guests brought by Mathilde’s caprice or his own professional propaganda. However, he sometimes experienced, in the desert of his life, a need for intimate peace, an oasis of consanguinity. These people seemed united; they tasted tranquil enjoyments of which he was ignorant. Why should he not strive to create a hearth like theirs for himself, to attach himself to life other than by the vain fibers of his love for a courtesan or his immeasurable ambition?

  Facing him, two type-specimens of young women were offered to the covetousness of his dream: one, Madeleine, whom he had already analyzed yesterday, pretty, who would become powerful, as he liked women to be, when her delicacy had ripened; the other, Aline, drier, more vibrant, brunette, with the attitudes of a she-wolf, also pretty, in her ardent fashion, with her haughty hooked nose and the violent incarnadine of her red lips against her mat skin.

  The former, whom he sensed, in any case, to be hostile, offered him, in spite of an unhealthy nervousness that would disappear as a result of marriage, a passive submission, an internal gravity and calm joys, like those of which he dreamed. The latter was a harpsichord from which he could drawn shrill harmonies, sensual and tempestuous chords; the tremulous fashion in which she had been looking at him since the start of the meal, the undulations with which she shivered at the words that emerged from his lips, the unconscious offer that she made of her being by her gestures and the intonation of her voice, all proved it.

  And yet, Madeleine seemed preferable to him, in spite of her coldness, by reason of the glorious promise of her body

  The effort of his imagination was, however, cut off by the imperious memory of his mistress. In the wellbeing of digestion, he relived burning minutes.

  The meal concluded. Faces became more serious again, ceremoniously frozen. Madame Romé folded her napkin in order to go into the drawing room. There was a noise of moving chairs, a rustle of skirts, the clinking of a few rapidly-emptied glasses, and Madame Romé took Caresco’s arm.

  In the drawing room, Madeleine and Aline poured the coffee with a light grace.

  Aline said to Caresco: “A glass of liqueur, Doctor? A cigar?”

  “Thank you, Mademoiselle, neither liqueurs not tobacco...”

  “You’re a phenomenon, then? At table you didn’t drink, and now you’re not smoking...”

  “Alcohol and tobacco can make the fingers tremble, and I need a great surety of hand.”

  “For your operations?”

  “For my operations, and my exercises in pistol-shooting.”

  “You fire a pistol?”

  “Very frequently.” He was, in fact, a remarkable shot. Every day, he went to shoot a few targets at a fashionable range, and was cited as one of the most skillful exponents. That did no harm to his reputation as a surgeon, and in the special milieu of sportsmen he had created useful connections, which opened the doors of the aristocratic drawing-rooms from which he drew his clientele.

  Aline allowed herself to be enveloped by a strange attraction emanating from the man she was seeing for the first time, and who seemed to be putting himself to the expense of flirting with her. She judged him to be different from the people she knew: stronger, with something about him that was indefinable and terrible and—in spite of that—attractive. She was also glad to observe that the hard-working and tenacious scientist was varnished with worldliness, and that he was evidently a sportsman.

  Before these appreciations, the malevolent reportage with which the surgeon’s character had been soiled melted away, and was annihilated, giving way to a confused admiration. The reaction was all the sharper for being unexpected, under the imperious influence of surprise. Less impressionable than Madeleine, Aline did not run into instinctive repulsions, abandoning herself entirely to the seductions of external qualities, of that which does not emanate from the darkness of the self.

  So, when her cousin, having drawn her to one side, asked her: “Well, what do you think of him?” she replied: “Quite remarkable. One divines great intelligence in him, and I can’t explain the antipathy that he inspires in you. I can assure you that I’ll be very happy to see him again in Les Andelys.”

  CHAPTER III

  The carriage that was taking the chatelaine of Les Bolois and her guests to Les Andelys had been traversing a large plain for ten minutes, with white, chalky roads, which were well-maintained but whose reverberation further augmented the overwhelming influence of the stifling heat. The thermometer marked thirty-two degrees in the shade.

  Armand Caresco had titled his straw hat in such a way as to protect his face from the sun’s rays and to be better able to gaze at the delightful young woman with the eyes full of light. He was astonished to see her so valiant after the week in which he had been living in proximity with her and watching her. No repetition of her nervous fit; a charming evenness of mood. Her nights, he had been told, were peaceful; Madeleine was sleeping calmly. However, he followed certain contractions of her physiognomy that still indicated a malaise, albeit explicable by the fierce heat.

  He evoked the night that he had just spent, far from his mistress, in the narrow bed of the château. If Madeleine’s sleep had been reparative, his had been shaken by dreams. An evolution had taken place in his brain. Madeleine had been its object.

  In the tension of a forced continence, he had dreamed about the splendid young woman, no longer suffering calmly, but agitated by passionate attitudes similar to those he had so often observed in the hysterics of the Salpêtrière. The unfathomable mystery of urges had poured sensuality into that mold of chastity. Morbid contortions had been transformed into appeals of sensuality.

  The throat, tranquil and pure after the tempest, the firm roundness of the erect breasts glimpsed during the crisis through the opening of the loosened corsage, the gracious curve of the legs, and the movements of the loins themselves, the broad hips so admirably formed for maternity—all those harmonious manifestations sanctified by nature had aspired the gross desires fermenting within him, and deflected scientific observation toward lasciviousness. The hours of darkness had flowed by in seizures of the flesh, violent and impetuous.

  Now that he had the young woman facing him, in the jolting of the carriage, his knee brushing hers, his blood heated up, his flesh harassed by the Saharan heat, he allowed himself to be increasingly carried away by the wings of his desire. To vary the contention of her attitude, and also to flee Caresco’s knee, she had crossed one leg over the other, displaying the beginning of a soft calf.

  The surgeon’s imagination became enthusiastic at that sight; he undressed the rest of her body, seeing the cleavage burst forth like a flower from its bud. Even the corset fell away, and Madeleine was radiant in the apotheosis of the splendid contours and delicate fires of her flesh.

  He sighed loudly.

  Embarrassed by the burning persistence of the gaze that repelled her, and by which she felt possessed, without being able to defend herself, Madeleine turned away, almost fearfully, to gaze at the landscape.

  The brake had just passed over the level crossing at Gaillon railway station, and had arrived at the Seine, which ran not far away. The horses, already sweating, had slowed down. The vicinity of the water spread a slight freshness in the increasingly fiery atmosphere.

  Madame Bise stopped the carriage and they all had the leisure to contemplate the panorama that extended into the distance, in great green bands cut by the ribbon of the Seine and the chalky patches of cliffs. In that land of ancient knights, populated by historic châteaux, convents and towers, on the left, before arriving at the Seine, there was the ancient wall of a Charterhouse, and then the peninsula of Tosny, a sprightly green hill beneath which the Roule tunnel had just b
een dug. To the right there was the little village of Courchelles, and, standing on the cliff, an isolated tower of medium dimensions, which Madame Bise named as the signal tower of Portmors. The bizarre sonority of the name caused Armand’s head to turn away; he was already weary of the landscape.

  The horses resumed a trot, going through lamentable villages—Bouafles, Vezillon—and past a narrow gorge at the end of which Château Gaillard was visible. Peasants went slowly by, carrying tools over shoulders stooped by heavy years of toil and poverty, saluting the carriage with a finger negligently raised to the rim of their straw hat. Madame de Jancy and Madeleine responded with nods of the head; Caresco looked at them disdainfully, from the full height of his strength of a man tailored in Herculean fashion for the battle of life.

  Oh, the existence of those poor fellows: an animal existence, devoid of desire, of conflict, of enjoyment eternally concerned with tomorrow’s morsel of bread; an existence of brute labor, days commenced too soon and ended late, to gain a few francs; the existence of the imbecilic and dogged toiler—how he despised it, and how he despised those who were its victims!

  “This region doesn’t seem to be rich!” he said to Madame Bise.

  “Ha! Not rich! They don’t work!”

  To corroborate what she said, the brake went past a gang of twenty laborers.

  “This,” Madame Bise continued, “is the richest soil one can imagine, but they don’t know how to take advantage of it. They remain in the rut of their primitive manual labor. For instance, look at all those apple trees and cherry trees, and the extraordinary quantity of fruit they produce! They don’t know how to exploit their wealth. Can you guess, my dear doctor, how much those beautiful greengages are sold for in certain establishments in England? As much as a shilling. And do you know how much they’re content to sell a five-kilo basket for here? Between one franc fifty and two francs!”

  Caresco’s mercantile soul, his atavistic soul, caused his eyes to gleam. Oh, if he were a landowner in this region, how he would be able to make his exploitation pay! He would have an outlet in London to convert those beautiful products of Norman soil into a rain of gold! And how truly stupid these people were to remain enmired in their trivial role as producers, not having any business sense, not understanding the eternal conclusion of La Fontaine’s fable, that when one takes the chestnuts from the fire, it’s necessary to eat them…not to know, in sum, what had been the strength of his own race, the intermediary role so obstinately played throughout the ages and in all circumstances by those of his blood.