“I owe it to the truth to say that he’s attempted interventions that seemed impossible, which have yielded marvelous results. I’ve seen him successfully remove tumors twice the size of my head. In other hands, the patients would have been done for. Yes, he’s saved some lives. But alongside that, how many deaths! How many unnecessary operations, under the appearance of good ideas?
“Look at his work on the liver: is it not extraordinary in its invention, its technique, even its reasoning? Well, the operations succeed, but the result has always been trivial. Ameliorations that have made him utter cries of victory, repeated, like the bleating of the sheep whose Panurge he is, by the echoes of a press in his pay…but the ameliorations are only temporary, followed more often than not by aggravations. Why operate, then, frightening families and risking death?
“Is not the role of the physician, when he understands that his science is vain, that his therapeutics have no influence to a fatal evolution, simply to palliate the death-throes, not to attempt a throw of the dice, a success as chancy as winning the jackpot in the lottery?
“Some have said to me: ‘even so, you’re doing useful and benevolent work, for in suppressing life you’re suppressing bitterness and suffering.’ But to what point am I the master of the existence of my peers? What right, what moral law, permits me to dispose of them?”
Savre stopped talking. People passing by turned to look at the two men in suits who seemed to be arguing. The avenue was increasingly depopulated; the Café Chinois put out its lights. They resumed walking toward the Arc de Triomphe, which stood out clearly against the fluid dark blue of the firmament.
“Yes,” Savre continued, “it’s a frightful problem that tormented me from the first day. I wondered what my share was of the responsibility for those audacious attempts, with me assisting, as the only aide.
“Some nights, I couldn’t sleep, and to put an end to my distress I ran away from my home, scarcely dressed, to go and see how the patients were doing. I had a key and went in silently. Generally, I found the sisters asleep and the patients who had undergone operations brutalized by morphine—for the good sisters stuff them with morphine, as you must have seen...
“Well, I only found one means to solve the problem that haunted my nights, which pursued me even into my dreams: I fled.”
Bordier felt that his companions had opened the utmost corners of his heart to him. He thought the same; like him, he sensed that he was going to flee that guilty collaboration. He was almost confused by not having already done so. Having the lack of decision of the weak, however, the uncertainty of a dreamer, would he have the courage to impart his decision to Caresco without invoking an appreciable motive?
“Yes,” he said, faintly, as if replying to an intimate question, “the man is culpable, very culpable.”
“Culpable, but necessary,” Savre continued, “as evil is necessary to good. Don’t shake your head my friend—let me explain my thinking. It’s a frightful thing to say, which truly makes one doubt at times a superior intelligence and bounty, but whichever way you turn your head, in the history of things as well as peoples, you see that those things and peoples only arrive at a definitive harmony after frightful destructions, ruins, revolutions, the slaking of hatreds and prolonged battles.
“Good doesn’t install itself straight away, of its own accord. Peace wouldn’t exist if war hadn’t existed. Look among the inferior animals, and further still, among the creatures of which one can’t say whether they’re vegetables or whether they mark the first phase of animal life: what incessant strife! Remount the scale of beings: everywhere it’s the same.
“Arrive at humans, in the end, and tell me whether or not it has required bloody epochs, suffering, heroism and death to arrive at the constitution of empires! Calculate what our Revolution cost, and look what frightful threats there still are on the horizon of socialism? Everywhere, always, conflict and evil—and progress accomplished as a result.
“Well, it’s the same in the particular case of surgery. More, perhaps, in that science than others there’s a need for men like Caresco, devoid of moral sense, swollen by ambition and sometimes by cupidity, whose shoulders are solid enough to support the weight of sin. They destroy, they gaze upon destruction—but then others rebuild on those ruins, taking advantage of what they have seen. It’s horrible, but that’s the way it is, always the same old formula: good has its source in evil; evil is necessary to good.”
They had arrived at the Arc de Triomphe. On the pillars, the stone carvings stood out, causing heroic gestures to project, sublime epics in the peace of the night. Savre indicated them with a broad sweep of his hand, as a consecration of his speech. Then, lifting his finger toward the infinity of the sky, he went on:
“But all that, the sky, the stars, all the magnificence of the forces that dominate us, our fellows have never been able to admire. They’re riveted to their miserable earthly passions, and don’t understand the heavens. Let’s pity them, and remain as we are, shall we, Bordier? That’s preferable.”
They shook hands and separated.
Bordier went home, his heart disturbed by what he had just heard. He went into his bedroom, glad to be back in his little intimate corner, the only place where he was truly at home. He cast a satisfied glance over the familiar objects: the table covered with newspapers, the books piled up in a small bookcase beside the bed, within arm’s reach.
The lamp set on the mantelpiece brightly illuminated a portrait of a woman that he went to pick up and considered for a long time. It was the photograph of a young woman of about eighteen, pretty, with thin features, further attenuated by the incomparable gleam of two large shining eyes. The photograph had been ineptly taken by a photographer of mediocre ability, and yet it was all that remained of a love story, his only love story, as modest and passionate as everything that involved him.
Yes, the thoughtful Bordier, that apostle of god, that scientist for the humble, that saint in whom humor often veiled immense pity, that utterly materialistic man, had also had his moment of poetry—but how brief and heart-breaking!
One evening, while he was still a neighborhood physician, a poor devil of a seamstress, attracted by his reputation for humanity, had come in search of him to visit one of her friends, a seamstress like her, a twenty-year-old orphan whom pulmonary tuberculosis was killing slowly.
In a dark house, he had followed the woman through the corridors of misery. In a sadly furnished room, on a soiled camp bed, lay a pale invalid, as pale as candle-wax, and so thin that it seemed that the bones were about to burst through the skin.
Between two suffocations, in a child-like voice, she had explained her lamentable odyssey to him, the eternal story heard a thousand times: childhood bronchitis, spitting blood, endless transpirations, emaciation, projecting ribs—the entire heart-rending cortege of consumption—and also her struggle to make a living, her disappointments when rich dressmaking establishments closed their doors on her because she was too weak to work, because the spectacle of her decline frightened her companions in labor; then the trips to the hospitals, her attempts in consulting rooms in which, having finally reached the doctors, she had been sent away because her illness was chronic, because there were no beds available, and because her case was not sufficiently interesting to invite the research of scientists, which would at least have admitted to her to a charity bed.
And Bordier, whose time was ordinarily too precious for him to listen to such stories, so banal in their atrocity, had lent a sympathetic ear to that one, responding to it with brusque and kind words, the yelps of a licking dog, had gently ausculated that skeleton covered with skin, which he feared to break by moving it. Then, when the consumptive, taking a dirty purse from beneath her pillow, had tried to pay him the fee for his visit with her last sous, Bordier had been seized by a burst of laughter emerging from the heart, in which there were sobs, and had forced her to put away her poor money, and promise to pay him later, when she was better.
&nbs
p; The next day, he had returned of his own accord, bringing a cluster of grapes and a little champagne—all that she could drink. He was not, however, under any illusion regarding the efficacy of his visits, and the power of his medicine, knowing that he was incapable doing anything against the malady, even delaying it in its course; but he was able to soothe, to calm the crises, and above all—above all!—to give the abominable debris that was on the way to extinction some hope, benevolent hope, to throw into that sinking heart the mist of illusion, to which consumptives cling so willingly.
Beneficent and merciful work, which is also the finest recompense of the medical apostolate, as the young physician understood. For he was one of those, fortunately still numerous, who make their consulting room into something more than the antechamber of the pharmacist’s counter. Wearied by the sickening work of savoir faire, rendered desperate by the insufficiency of the remedies that he administered sagely, to aid nature and not to cure, he had faith in the moral medicament. The majority of maladies, especially in women, being the result of nervous decline, the ensemble of a few vague symptoms exasperated by the sensibility of the entourage, he treated them with suggestive remedies.
Like Charcot, he understood Lourdes; he regretted that Gruby13 had not had a chair at the Faculté, and that the illegality of the methods of a certain charlatan14 did not permit him to send his own patients to seek a cure in a famous wooden tub. Not that he doubted science, which he considered as the sole regenerator of society, but he envisaged it from a superior point of view, indemnified of all the ignominies of professionalism, the base work of commerce. For him, a great discovery became an abominable thing when it began to be exploited; he felt a disgust for it, similar to what a composer feels when he hears his music massacred by be quavering of a barrel-organ. And yet, his role was neither to discover not to compose; he was a popularizer, an interpreter—so he often suffered, in his mercy and his honesty, in being reduced, by the harsh requirements of life, to the exercise of a profession rather than an art.
Beside the poor consumptive he had felt flowing in his soul all those initial aspirations that hard daily labor, the fatigue of running around and human ingratitude tended to annihilate. Next to her, he had become once again the apostle ready for sacrifice, the lay priest in the purest sense of the term. To the tears in his patient’s eyes the tears of his own heart responded; the plaints of that ripped breast gave impetus to the words that calmed, that put fear to sleep.
He went to see her every morning at first; he came back in the evening. Later, he acquired the habit of going up to see her several times a day, when the hazard of his work took her past her door. Every time, there was some further alms that he made her accept discreetly: one day, a comfortable bed, which, he claimed, was cluttering up his apartment; the next day, after frightful coughing fits that had held her suffocating, folded in two all night long, he installed a nurse permanently at her bedside.
Surprised at first by so much devotion, she had acquired the habit of receiving the man she called her savior. Her savior! She really believed that. Under the effect of sage medication and the relative comfort with which the young physician surrounded her, her coughing fits became more spaced out. Her transpirations, already so abundant that the friend who lived in a neighboring room had to get up twice a night to change the sheets on her bed, diminished in consequence. But what she still did not have was an appetite. She experienced an increasing horror of all kinds of nourishment, and it required Bordier’s influence to make her absorb a little specially-prepared meat broth.
And as the consumption accomplished its inevitable work, she believed that she was coming back to life, interpreted as a good sign every new symptom, the telling of a fatal chaplet. She even found the strength to make herself up when she knew that her physician was going to come; she kept a mirror on the bed, before which she rearranged her hair, sticky with sweat. One day, she curled it, and had a joyful rush of blood to her cheeks when she perceived that Bordier had noticed her coquetry.
He put caresses into his voice when he spoke to her, lingered in lowering his head on her fleshless back when he ausculated her, maintained in the solidity of his hands the poor thinness of hers, as if he wanted to pass some of his vital fluid and his energy into that dying flame. Those touches were exclusively platonic; what could he have desired, in any case, of that lamentable carcass, those poor frail limbs, that torso where the ribs outlined their arcs and where the vanished breasts no longer indicated anything but the nipples—from all of that ruin, so miserable in sum, so shrunken and so thin, that she only occupied the space of a child in that big bed?
What persisted, however, was the eloquence of the large dark eyes; in them, the life was intense and ardent; whereas the rest of the body was dissolving into sputum and sweat, they conserved such a gleam that Bordier could not help admiring them. Oh, how infamous Fatality was to have thrown the escheat of malady over that creature, so splendidly created to love and be loved, and what credit could it accord to the superior Force to destroy its work so wretchedly in suffering? It was a monstrous perversion of nature, the frightful aberration of a sculptor destroying a statue with small blows of a hammer after having made it perfect!
And the more he got to know her, the more he came to appreciate the woman that she might have been, the more tender his feelings for her became. The consumptive responded to that with an unconscious affection, an ever-increasing emotion that almost made her forget her illness, removing her from the egotism typical of the chronically ill, especially those with diseases of the lungs.
The young physician did not take long to divine the nature of the influence that he was having on his patience; he thus conceived an act of supreme pity, which he put into execution.
One evening, not long before she died, the day had been better and they were chatting. Sitting beside her bed he was holding her feverish hands.
“My friend,” she said, “How will I repay you for all that you’ve done for me when I’m better/”
“Don’t talk about repaying me,” he replied. “I’m the one who is glad to have encountered you. Don’t play the innocent; you know very well that you’ve given birth to a sentiment in me...”
“A sentiment?” she said, astonished.
“Yes, a genuine sentiment, in sum. My dear friend, how it warms the heart to know that one has sown joy and will harvest gratitude!”
“An infinite gratitude!”
“And to think,” Bordier continued, “that the person to whom one has done good might perhaps consent one day, when she has recovered her health, to march through life by her benefactor’s side...”
“What do you mean?” she said, raising herself up from her pillow with unaccustomed force, so violently had the surprise shocked her.
“I mean, Jeanne,” Bordier replied, calling her by her forename for the first time, at which she shivered, “that you are a heavenly angel, and that I love you to the point of making you my wife, if that does not displease you.”
“Your wife! We’ll be married!”
“Yes, we’ll be married.”
She lay there, her throat constricted by emotion, only able to utter a few delighted stammers. But the young man was paid for his generous act of pity by the illumination of her wide eyes. Thus, she was perfectly sure of being cured, since Bordier wanted to make her his wife. What a happy life she would have with that man, and what a folly of devotion and abnegation she felt in regard to the person who, after having snatched her from death, was offering her love, and a home!
“How happy I am, my friend, how happy I am!”
Large tears followed the meager furrows of her cheeks. Bordier sponged them away gently with his handkerchief, calming her overexcitement with a few soothing words, under whose influence she went to sleep, exhausted by so much happiness.
A few days later she passed away, in all the joy of the illusion, her large dark eyes fixed until the last moment on the man she adored, on the savior of her soul, if not her b
ody, carrying into the afterlife the radiant purity of a soul given birth in death.
CHAPTER VIII
On the insistence of Madame Bise, Madame de Jancy and her daughter Madeleine had consented to prolong their stay at the Château des Bolois. The month of September came to an end. After the heavy rains that had lasted for a fortnight, the weather had become fine again, and that afternoon, the warm rays of a sun that was concluding its orbit too soon were offering a joyous expansion to the château’s guests, who, by habit and by inclination, where sitting outside beneath the shade of the lakeside chalet, on the edge of the lawn.
Madame Bise, comfortably installed in a hammock, was lending all the effort of her futile brain to reading a report of a feminist congress in which she had taken part. She had been taken there by a friend, Miss Pisword, an old English spinster who wanted to claim the prerogatives of a sex that her ugliness had prevented her from utilizing in commerce with men. At times, that overly arid study, combined with the work of a slightly laborious digestion, misted her cerebral cells; the report escaped her hands and a discreet and regular purr, inflating her mossy lips, caused Madame de Jancy and Madeleine—who were working beside her—to raise their heads. They looked at one another, smiling maliciously, and then resumed their occupations, quietly, in order not to interrupt their relative’s happy torpor
Madeleine, her back curved over the embroidery of an altar-cloth, straightened up and stretched her limbs, abandoning herself to the back of her chair. She looked at the calm silvery water. The leaping of carp occasionally troubled the silent harmony, and concentric ripples spread out, grew and died on the bank. She looked at the green carpet of the shore, which dead leaves enriched with patches of gold. She looked through a gap in the trees at the dull vista of the countryside denuded by the harvest, the horizon magisterially delimited by a distant row of poplars, and the blue immensity of a sky purified by a sun that she could not see.
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