The Necessary Evil

by André Couvreur

  In the first-floor drawing rooms, as soon as Madeleine saw her fiancé appear, she detached herself from several ladies of the feminist congress, in whose midst Madame Bise was enthroned, and ran toward him.

  “Madeleine, my dear beloved,” said the young man, “I reproach myself for not having been here with you already for a long time. That fault lies with the best of my friends, to whom I now introduce you, Dr. Jean Bordier.

  Madeleine extended an elegantly hand to Bordier, gloved in pink suede that extended to the elbow, leaving the firm white roundness of the upper arm bare to the short sleeve of the low-cut dress in pink surah.

  How delightful and dazzling Bordier found her, with her impeccably milky shoulders emerging from the tender corsage, with slender, vigorous and supple line of the throat, and a bosom over which the little blue threads of the veins ran timidly, and, above all, with that marvelously graceful blonde head and blue eyes with a dark gaze—the whole dominated by the overwhelming gilded mass of the hair, which, that evening, in the combined light of candles and electricity, appeared more golden than ever.

  Yes, truly, she was an adorable creature, gentle and strong, tender and passionate, aristocratic from the tips of her little feet, imprisoned in black satin, to the last vaporous wisp of her hair, and well worthy of determining the life of his friend.

  “No, you’re not too late. Maman hasn’t come down yet; she’s taking her time getting dressed. You can’t imagine how coquettish Maman has become, since I’ve been engaged!”

  Georges interrogated his friend’s physiognomy. Bordier could not repress a sign of admiring approval. Madeleine perceived it.

  “You’ll make me blush,” she said. “I’m so glad to have made myself beautiful for you.”

  People were coming in: plump or stiff mothers with tall or short daughters, flat-chested beneath the tulle of their low necklines; a polytechnician with a pimply forehead; dandies in jackets with flowers in the buttonholes and monocles in their eyes, dragging their sickening futility through the salons. Madeleine had taken her fiancé’s arm, exchanging handshakes and kisses, happy and proud, triumphant in all her splendor and joy.

  Madame Bise, self-important and noisy, as if she were giving the party, was accepting greetings, making introductions, entirely at home, waving an immense fan that, with every flip of the wrist, caused the power with which she had thought it appropriate to ornament her apple-cheeks to fly away, attracting attention with exclamations in a southern accent: “There you are! What! Go on! What a shame!”

  Nearby, draped in a bright green costume, was a tall, stiff, bony individual of masculine appearance coiffed with a torsade of dark gray hair, with a mouth garnished with prominent, widely-spaced incisors: Miss Pisword, the president of the feminist congress, also harvesting a part of the honors and attentions of the worthy aunt, infatuated with her. With her British arrogance, imprinted with a Puritan reserve, like a mainmast swaying from side to side, she subjected to introductions, greeting them with comical replies, grotesque in her violent costume, her fleeting profile, her fleshless bosom and the yellow mossy smile that she sometimes sketched in reply to compliments.

  And everyone twittered and fluttered, back and forth and around and und, bowing, sitting down on the velvet benches, issuing or accepting invitations to dance, which they inscribed on their cards.

  “I don’t know what Maman is doing to be so late! I must go tell her that there are a lot of people here already.”

  Georges did not retain her. She flew off as birds do, in a flutter of wings.

  People were still arriving and, disorientated at not being received by the mistress of the house, were spreading out randomly through the salons. An orchestra of strings and woodwinds came to gather around the piano, disposing music-stands and scores.

  The Vicomtesse de Mesma, sprightly and precious, appeared with her round raptorial eyes. She embraced Madame Bise, and then had herself introduced by her to a lady whose thin and bilious daughter seem to be suffering.

  Then Monsieur and Madame Romé made their entrance, Madame Bise welcomed them with an exclamation. “There you are! How are you? Bonjour, Aline. Are you well, darling?”

  No, Aline was not in good health, and complained of it to her aunt. For some time, she had felt pains in her liver. The family physician, Dr. Cartaux, had said that he could not find anything wrong. Deep down, she was convinced that Monsieur Cartaux was behind the times, that he did not understand her malady. And she added, in a whisper to Madame Bise: “I’d have liked a consultation with Dr. Caresco.”

  “Which? The father or the son?”

  “The son, Armand Caresco, naturally—the one who’s much occupied with diseases of the liver, I’m told. So, I wanted a consultation, but my parents didn’t want to take me. They say all sorts of things, and don’t want to admit that I’m suffering. Yes, I’m suffering a great deal. Is he coming this evening, Monsieur Caresco?”

  “No, my darling. He has too much work to do.”

  “How annoying that is! I would have been so glad to see him.” A cloud of sadness veiled her pretty face—but when Madame Bise had promised her in a whisper to take her to see Armand Caresco in secret from her parents, she became immeasurably joyful.

  “He’s astonishing, that young surgeon,” Madame Bise continued, out loud, in a fashion to be heard. “He worked another miracle not long ago—all the newspapers are talking about it. Look—there’s his assistant, who can tell us about it. Hey! You over there!”

  It was Bordier, who was passing by, to whom she called out in that irreverent fashion, waving her fan. He did not understand the signal to begin with; then, when he had understood, he turned his back and drew away—but Madame Bise sent Aline after him, who graciously requested his arm.

  “Well, young man, it appears that you’ve worked another miracle, over there in the Avenue Hoche?”

  Bordier, vexed by that patronizing tone, felt a surge of anger, He wanted to reply with ridicule.

  “Miracles? We work them every day…we’re opening a branch at Lourdes.”

  Madame Bise swelled up with pride.

  Accentuating the thinness of his smile, he continued: “And if I can’t say that you’re their Holy Virgin, at least I’m intimately convinced that you’re no stranger to the birth of these miracles.”

  He had spoken as malevolently as his timid nature permitted, with a sudden reversion toward the hateful ideas with regard to Armand Caresco that had still been filing his soul a little while ago—but Madame Bise had not understood the sarcastically exaggerated allusion that the young man had made, for, in sum, if she extolled the surgeon so much, it was purely out of enthusiasm, southern ebullience, a need for expansion, in the same way that she was presently occupied with feminism. So, not understanding, she said: “You’re right”—which caused Bordier a certain amazement.

  After a moment’s silence, she added: “And is she doing well, at least?”

  “Who?”

  “The mother.”

  “What mother?”

  “The grandmother of the little girl who threw herself off the fourth floor.”

  Bordier did not understand. “What, there’s a little girl who threw herself off the fourth floor?”

  “No, silly, it was her grandmother. Come on, don’t play the innocent—anyway, it’s in all the evening papers.”

  And she took out of her pocket an article clipped from a newspaper, which she held out to Bordier. In the form of a brief article relating the accident and the operation that followed, a skillful advertisement lauded the surgeon. Bordier was revolted to see his own name similarly made public, attached to that of Caresco.

  That he falsifies a claim for himself, he thought, that he takes advantage of a suicide—of which he is, in sum, the cause, since the suicide derived from a cadaver—to sound the mercenary trumpet of renown, is one thing…but to mingle my name, previously obscurely honorable, with his atrocities, I absolutely refuse to tolerate!

  And he stood there
, frowning, in contrast with the exuberance of Madame Bise, who, surrounded by the fluttering and rusting circle of ladies, read the printed article aloud.

  The Vicomtesse de Mesma had drawn the bilious young woman and her mother into the group; she uttered enthusiastic exclamations at every sentence the reader inflated with her southern dissonance. She underlined the reading with: “He’s astonishing, you see!... Admirable!... Marvelous!...”

  Standing to one side, but following the conversation, Monsieur Ponviane, who had just arrived, was surprised by that enthusiasm and the importance that the newspapers were according to the publicity of a simple incident.

  “You see,” Madame Bise said to Bordier, when she had finished her dithyrambic peroration, “that I was right to say that you work miracles.”

  Bordier shrugged his shoulders politely.

  “You’re truly too modest,” said the Vicomtesse de Mesma, who had noticed the gesture. “I absolutely owe my life to Dr. Caresco. He operated on me when I as condemned by all the other physicians.” And with a gesture of ecstasy, looking heavenwards, she added: “Ah, without him! Without him! For me, you see, there are two things in the world: God and Caresco!”

  The bilious young woman was prodigiously interested by the conversation. Blood flowed to her face, chasing the stigmata of chlorosis from her cheeks. She said a few words to her mother, who then approached Madame Bise.

  “You see, Madame, the state that my poor daughter is in. She no longer obtains any benefit from the various treatments that he physicians have prescribed for her. It’s her liver that’s causing her to suffer. Tell me, since Dr. Caresco is one of your friends, will you introduce us to him?”

  The Vicomtesse de Mesma, comprehending that she would lose the profit of her touting if it were Madame Bise who introduced the invalid into the house in the Avenue Hoche, rose to the challenge. Her eyes shone, her nose, like a hawk’s beak, accentuated its curve. With an avalanche of words, like a shopkeeper talking up his wares, she threw herself on the prey that as getting away from her,

  “But I’ll take you there myself, to Dr. Caresco. He has a great affection for me, as he loves all of those whose lives he’s saved. You’ll see, he’s a charming man. It seems that it’s him who owes you all the gratitude for the good he’s done you. And one is so well surrounded in his operating theater! It’s so clean, so comfortable! The sisters are so gentle with the patients! Oh, don’t talk to me about other nurses; there’s no one like the good sisters for showing devotion, is there, Madame? And if you knew how many of my friends he’s rescued from distress, how many I’ve taken to him who, like you, Mademoiselle, felt desperate, and whom he got back on their feet in a week!”

  The discussion continued. Rendezvous were arranged.

  At that moment, a chambermaid irrupted into the salons and, slipping through the groups that were beginning to dance, reached Georges Ponviane.

  “Monsieur, come quickly…Madame and Mademoiselle have been taken ill.”

  “Bring Monsieur Bordier immediately,” said Georges, running to the stairway.

  He went into the bedroom, of which another fearful domestic dared not cross the threshold, where the door stood ajar.

  By the dubious light of the single candle that, the lamp having been knocked over, was feebly illuminating the intimate luxury of the objects, blurring the embroidered flowers of the silk curtains, magnifying the shadows of the alcove, where garments were strewn pell-mell on the bed, in the silky precipitation of a hasty toilette, George was terror-stricken by the sight of two bodies lying on the parquet in fixed, stiff attitudes: the ornamented bodies of the mother and the daughter, their bare shoulders emerging from their dresses. Around them was the disorder of things knocked over in the fall, including an overturned chair.

  “Oh, my God! My God, what’s happened?”

  He ran to Madeleine first, knelt down, felt her cold hand, and raised her read, which was resting on the pillow of her golden hair. Her expression was calm, her eyes closed, her features pure.

  “Madeleine!” he moaned, “What’s wrong…? One might think that she were dead! Madeleine, my beloved Madeleine, speak to me, answer me!”

  And with despair, overwhelmed by the suddenness of the drama, unconscious of his ideas as of his movements, he stood up, looking for something or someone—he did not know.

  Fortunately, Bordier appeared. Georges felt his anguish diminishing.

  “Oh, my friend, what a horrible thing! Look at Madeleine! It’s frightful!” His respiration was halting. In his amorous egotism, he forgot Madame de Jancy, seemingly ignoring the fact that she was lying inanimate alongside her daughter. He squeezed the physician’s arm vigorously. “Save her, my friend. Save her!”

  Bordier disengaged himself from the fearful grip, leaned over Madeleine, measured her pulse with his fingertips, lifted her eyelids and interrogated the eyes.

  “Fainted!” he said, briefly. “Unlace her corset and dab her face with a damp cloth. It’s nothing.”

  Georges sighed loudly, steeped a napkin with water from a carafe, and returned to kneel beside his fiancée while Bordier, now leading over Madame de Jancy, observed that she was nothing more than a cadaver, already cold.

  “Georges,” he said, standing up, “you need to get Madeleine out of here, urgently, before she comes round. Her mother is dead.”

  Georges started trembling again, while Bordier conserved all his composure and authority. Aided by a chambermaid, he carried Madeleine’s limp body into the next room, which was her own.

  It was the first time that the fiancé had crossed his beloved’s threshold—and in what terror, what catastrophe! Instead of entering that sacred refuge with the harmonious figure of the young woman on his arm, with laughter in the eyes and lips full of love, it was an inanimate body that he was sustaining with difficulty, which he helped to place heavily on the blue satin coverlet. Instead of the luminous radiance that would have greeted him in any other circumstances, it was a room scarcely lit by urgent flickerings, in a funeral disorder! Instead of amorous words and joyful exclamations prompted by the ingenuities and the thousand trivia that decorated the room, there were Bordier’s bleak instructions, the futile haste of the maidservant, the slap of the damp napkin on the young woman’s cheeks: all the disarray of the drama, with the irony of the muffled rhythm of the orchestra downstairs, violating the drama up above.

  On the landing, Georges’ father and Madame Bise, alerted to what was happening, dared not penetrate into the room where Madame de Jancy was still lying on the floor, and stood there in confusion, letting the catastrophe drift. The aunt, however, unable to suppress the religion of science, called out to Bordier as he went past.

  “Well, what a story! She’s dead! Are you perfectly sure? Perhaps it’s only a attack...people have been known to be buried alive! Are you sure that she’s dead? And of what? Tell me, of what?”

  “I don’t know,” Bordier replied, irritatedly. “Probably a ruptured aneurism—but I don’t know.”

  “I know,” said Madame Bise. “It’s something in her chest that will have burst. My sister-in-law must have had a malady of the chest. She often had difficulty breathing. I wanted to take her to see Dr. Caresco—the father, the homeopath—who would surely have cured her, but she refused. My God, what a calamity! Are you perfectly sure that she’s dead? What if someone were to fetch Dr. Caresco? For you’re very young...”

  Bordier looked at her blue eyes, anguished by distress, behind her lorgnon. Always Caresco! Caresco: a fatal name, which seemed to sound like a knell, accompanying the deaths to which he was a witness. Even when he had nothing to do with the event, a bizarre destiny brought that name to the ears, imposed it strangely, along with the funeral cortege, the shroud, the bier...

  CHAPTER X

  In his mistress’ house, Armand Caresco had reserved a room for himself on the first floor, where he had installed a kind of study. A vast table in blackened wood, contrasting, in its vulgarity, with the rest of the furnit
ure, was covered in pamphlets, scientific papers, notes, newspapers, and all the elements of a book that he was revising, on the surgery of the liver.

  These papers, methodically classified, arranged in various piles, symbolized by their neatness the practical mind of the man who was utilizing them. Within arm’s reach there was a portable telephone, putting him in communication with his sanitarium and the rest of Paris, a marvelous apparatus that transported his thought in a second to wherever he wanted it to go, a worthy complement of his activity and feverish affairs.

  The remainder of the furniture consisted of miscellaneous items, the detritus of the beautiful Tripe-merchant’s former habitations: a chaise-longue, once very useful in a professional context, now abandoned; a Chinese cabinet, the gift of one of the sons of the Sun, an ambassador in Paris; low chairs originating from a room she had furnished in secret from a lover with whom she was cohabiting. On the walls there were gross imitations of tapestry, and, surrounded by a bright gilt frame, a sickening color print, representing an Emperor of Russia and a President of the French Republic giving one another the accolade. At the back of the room, on an iron tripod, there was a target.

  It was here that Caresco, indifferent to the ambience, utterly engrossed in his work—and, in any case, not very artistic—spent hours hard at work. Here, there was nothing of the surgeon, everything of the man of science. The long late nights were his best work, when Mathilde did not drag him to her stupid demi-mondaine gatherings, went to bed early, or, under the pretext of going to the theater with friends, went to consummate an illegitimate adultery in some Montmartre cabaret.