The Necessary Evil

by André Couvreur

  That was said casually and unhurriedly, with a resolute air that impressed Bordier more than any rhetorical posturing. What atrocious will buoyed up that man!

  As he went through the open door behind him, Bordier had a furious desire to lay the man dead at his feet—and yet, he felt dominated nevertheless.

  In the vestibule, the foreign colleagues and Berger were still waiting. The student said to Caresco: “Tomorrow, then, for the fibroma?”

  “No need to put yourself out, my friend,” the surgeon replied. “Monsieur Bordier, whom I introduce to you, has returned from his journey and has agreed to resume his service with me tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER XVIII

  In front of the Pavillon de Madrid, where the rendezvous for the encounter had been arranged, the landau that brought Jean Bordier came to a halt with the sound of hooves striking the frost-hardened ground. Georges Ponviane got out first, holding a pistol-case under his arm. Then, with sighs of liberation, came the other witnesses, Monsieur des Trieux, a friend of both Bordier and Ponviane, a renowned fencer who made a specialty of direction affairs of honor and Dr. Piliat, a former student comrade, who had accepted the ingrate role of assisting Bordier medically, and finally, Bordier himself, apparently very calm and confident, only revealing his emotion by a more pronounced blinking of the eyelids behind the lenses of his spectacles.

  The weather was fine and dry; a pale sun emerging from the morning mists was brightening the distant road, launching the effort of its rays through the inextricable thicket of bare trees, whose branches and twigs were clearly outlined in black steaks against the blue-tinted atmosphere. The melting of snow, due to the milder temperature of the preceding days, had accumulated pools of water in places, which the return of the chill had frozen; on the edge of the ditches, incompletely-dissolved snow formed long ermine stripes that extended like a winter wrap along the deserted road.

  Georges Ponviane took out his watch.

  “Nine o’clock precisely. We’ve arrived first.”

  “Punctuality is the politeness of duelists,” said Monsieur des Trieux, parodying a famous saying. He relieved his fellow witness of the pistol-box, took the guns out of the case and checked the triggers. Dr. Piliat had taken Bordier to one side and as plying him with questions.

  “Come on, old chap, what’s happened? Why this quarrel with Caresco? What do you have against him?”

  “Don’t interrogate me, my dear Piliat. It’s a secret that I haven’t even told my witnesses.”

  “A woman, eh?”

  “Perhaps.”

  The previous day’s scene, after Mademoiselle de Jancy’s operation, at which he had assisted, passed before his eyes again. He saw himself issuing the slap, with a reasoned self-composure, in front of witnesses, when, Madeleine, having been carried back to her bed had woken up from her terrible operation, he had gone back down to the surgeon’s study, where several people were present. He recalled Caresco’s sudden pallor, the flash of hatred that had traversed his face, and the marvelous force of contention that had enabled him to control himself, and not to respond to the insult with violence.

  He also recalled the stupefaction of Georges Ponviane, who was there, enquiring about the probable consequences of the operation, and who had seized him by the arm, saying: “What are you doing? Are you mad?”

  “No, no, I’m not mad,” he had replied. “Monsieur Caresco knows perfectly well why I slapped him.”

  Then, there had been the fastidious consequences of the gesture, the visit of the seconds to the physician, the negotiations, rendered more difficult by his refusal to give a reason or the insult. Was it to Georges—for whom, in sum, he was fighting—that he was going to explain that the sole means of getting out of the moral dilemma in which he was caught was to kill or be killed? Could he tell him why he had decided that moment of redemption? Could he tell him that he had waited, before provoking Caresco, for the outcome of the operation carried out on Madeleine, because he was able until that moment to be useful to his friend, by keeping watch with an extreme zeal over the success of the abominable crime?

  He could have refused to assist in the crime, letting Caresco work with his temporary aide, young Berger, but would not his friend’s fiancée have been running greater risks in the inexperienced hands of the student? Since the action was inevitable, because he was gagged by the secrecy of his profession, by friendship, by the logic of the situation and by his own conscience, which screamed at him to remain silent, he had wanted to carry through his alleviating task to the end, doing what he could to ensure the maximum chance of success by offering to assist in the operation.

  But with what anguish he had applied the chloroform compress to the young woman’s mouth! How he had quivered, with halting respiration, at the outset. How he had trembled as the knife cleaved the flesh, as the blood spurted forth, as Caresco had withdrawn the parcel of formless meat, the gravid uterus, the lamentable debris of the rape, with a regal mastery!

  The monstrous virtuoso had not felt the chill of the murder pass, had been no more stirred than in the arduous minutes of other procedures. How Bordier had admired that calmness, and how he had hated it!

  And now, before the magnificent perspective of the Bois, where, in a moment the pistol would be aimed at him by that same ferocious and sure hand, what would become of him?

  Death, probably, emerging from the barrel, laying him out on the cold ground.

  He knew that Caresco was an excellent shot. He had only had practiced extensively with the épée, but the quality of the insulted party and the choice of weapons belonged to his adversary. He had, therefore, in all consciousness, fully informed as to the consequences of his action, decided this minute of reparation, of expiation, during which he would again play the role of the weaker party, manifesting once again the self-renunciation, the obscure disinterest with which destiny seemed to have stigmatized him since birth.

  But what a pity to be obliged to go like this, in the annihilation of his dreams, paying the reparative debt for another, without having drawn from life what it might contain of the restful, the consoling, without having savored amour, a family, going like a rudderless boat to run on to a reef within sight of port!

  Fatality! Fatality and ridiculous abnegation, which he almost cursed now, before the Bois, which would, in a few weeks’ time, at the first caresses of spring, become so seductive again by virtue of the glorious manifestations of the life of plants and people! There, flowers would grow; there, the green carpet of the grass would extend, the trees would cover themselves with the ardent life of buds and leaves; there, the steam would sing its slow plaint again, and along the path, the cyclists would glide in graceful flight.

  His soul was recharged by bucolic emotions, and he wept over everything that he was about to lose. But now a revolt set in, a determination to hurt the man who wanted to harm him. His arm would be steady and sure; he would strike, for Honor, for Right, for his friend, for himself.

  “Here they are!” exclaimed Monsieur des Trieux.

  Indeed, at the bend in the road, a landau appeared.

  Georges went to Bordier. “Jean, here’s you adversary…isn’t there a means of settling things? There’s still time.”

  “You know that’s impossible.”

  “You still don’t want to tell me anything?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Finally, if misfortune befalls you—for it’s necessary to be prepared for anything—don’t you have some last recommendation, some confidence to transmit?”

  “I can see,” said Bordier, with a melancholy smile, “that you think, as the others do, that I’m fighting because of some matter of a woman. I know that my obstinate silence regarding the motive for my insult must aid that supposition, and I’m not astonished that you, my best friend, my brother, have come to offer yourself as a supreme messenger—but make no mistake; the person for whom I’m fighting will never suspect it if I remain alive; all the more reason why she should not suspect it if I die.�
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  “Jean, my dear Jean,” Ponviane replied, extraordinarily distressed by that simple declaration, “you’ll always be the same, devoted and good to the point of folly. I don’t know what’s causing you to act; I can’t imagine the reason for your gesture of violence toward Caresco. Well, in spite of the signal service that the man has rendered me in saving the life of my fiancée, I sense that justice and right are on your side, and I’m with you, with all my heart.”

  “Thank you,” said Bordier. “Your words will console me as I die.”

  “Die!” Georges exclaimed. “Why talk about dying? Go on...with two bullets at thirty paces...”

  “It’s absolutely necessary, however that one of us dies!”

  Bordier had spoken with a somber fire that struck his friend. Nevertheless, he did not have the leisure to continue the conversation, for the adverse party had arrived. For his seconds, Caresco had Dr. Savre, his former assistant, and Berger, the student, very proud of the role that he was playing, divining that he was about to take Bordier’s place after the affair.

  As soon as he set foot on the ground, Savre came straight to Ponviane and shook his hand vigorously. “You know,” he said, “that I could not do other than assist Caresco, but I hope that all goes well for Bordier. Tell him that.”

  The surgeon had got down from the landau, well rested after an excellent night of ten hours’ sleep. As a physician he had chosen an inoffensive colleague, saying to his witnesses, with a broad laugh: “Bah! If I’m wounded, I’ll operate on myself!”

  Thus, he always seemed to accompany the gravest concerns with a jovial irony, as if, being endowed with a doubling of his personality, one Caresco was always mocking the other.

  Savre, who had studied him for a long time, and tried to separate out, from the tangle of his actions, the threads of reasons and those of unconsciousness, had not baulked at agreeing to be his second. It was one more thread or his dossier, the attitude of the man during that grave quarter of an hour. And he judged him extraordinarily confident in his destiny, going to meet danger with an insouciance akin to unconsciousness.

  Was it that the Harmony of things wanted to cover the man, useful to its obscure designs, with a kind of latent immunity, protecting him with its somber wing? Savre’s philosophy accommodated the theory of the evil necessary to good, the vice necessary to virtue. A new proof was manifest in this encounter, and he awaited the result with a keen interest.

  As soon as Caresco saw Ponviane he went to him. “I’ve just come from seeing Mademoiselle de Jancy,” he said. “She’s doing very well. Pulse normal, no fever. I’m sure that she’ll heal rapidly and that it won’t be long before you’re a fortunate spouse…a fortunate father.”

  Ponviane, who had quivered with joy and gratitude at the beginning of that declaration, suddenly felt his enthusiasm vanish at the last word pronounced by Caresco. What irony, what evasion, what malevolent expression he divined in the intonation of the voice! It was an obscure intuition that put him on his guard against that incomprehensible man and now, with all the force of his soul, he wished that the fate of arms would turn against him.

  Monsieur des Trieux drew the groups into side-path, and, after a conference with the witnesses, tossed a coin in the air to decide the positions.

  “Heads!” called Georges Ponviane.

  The witnesses bent down. The coin showed tails. Bordier would have the sun in his eyes. Ill-luck was pursuing him to the end.

  Dr. Savre counted out the paces.

  At that moment, when a new contest was about to be engaged for him, in which he could ask himself whether Fortune was still on his side, whether he projectile that emerged from his adversary’s weapon might either kill him, or ruin him by putting him in a state of incapacity for work for the rest of his life in consequence of the loss of a limb, a hand, or even one of the ten fingers of which he had so much need for his daily endeavors, Armand Caresco was truly admirable in his audacious tranquility.

  Was it courage? No. Courage would have consisted of having, like Bordier, a anguished soul, a heart downing in bitterness, sadness and lassitude, but nevertheless remaining, in spite of the fear, upright and proud in confrontation with the danger, with the probability of a fatal outcome. Courage also consists of being like good King Henri IV, who, seized by an atrocious fear before the enemy, dung the steel of his spurs into the flanks of his mount, in order to charge.

  He, the surgeon, was not shaken by any sentiment of dread. He came to the encounter with confidence in his star, with the conviction that the skill, precision and rapidity of his fire would permit him to lay his adversary on the ground before Bordier even had time to press the trigger of his pistol. He knew that his gesture would have the rigorous, mathematical precision of the days when he held the scalpel, when he avoided one artery in order to cut another.

  He was coming to an operation—and it was that marvelous composure; that self-confidence; that will to succeed; and also that carelessness of a danger he did not perceive, and did not admit, acting like a tightrope-walker who is sure of his goal as long as he does not look down; that sovereign scorn for consequences, the result of an unhealthy cerebral organization which had modified common sense; and finally, that ardent will to achieve the end without lingering over the choice of means—everything that had aided him thus far to succeed in life—which haloed him with superb indifference at that critical moment.

  And while Bordier came and went, moved by the supreme contemplation of nature, but the flood of memories, by an intimate revolt, experiencing a real suffering in having to master his nerves, he, immobile granite, wrapped in his fur cloak, with his hands in his pockets in order not to be taken by surprise by a shiver due to the morning chill, considered his adversary with a hard face and a dominating eye, searching for the spot that he would strike. For he had decided not to kill, because of the annoyances that might attract to him, the tedious and harmful publicity that such an event would not fail to produce. He was sure now of Bordier’s silence; his conduct had proved that to him.

  Monsieur des Trieux was busy. He placed the adversaries, handed them the loaded weapons. On contact, without looking, Caresco recognized that fate had also allotted him the weapon of his choice. He was accustomed to it, handling it daily, fingering it habitually. Chance was marching with him, implacably. He posed himself, his upper body leaning slightly backwards, sideways on, the left hand behind his back.

  At that moment, he felt Bordier’s gaze fixed upon him. He turned his own way, fleeing before the bitterness and the reproach.

  In the distance, a military band struck up an allegro.

  “Are you ready?” shouted Monsieur des Trieux.

  Bordier squeezed his pistol, his eyes blinking in the sunlight. He felt Ponviane’s frightened heart reaching out to him.

  The solemnity of the occasion gripped the witnesses and the physicians, frozen in sculptural poses. Monsieur des Trieux’s voice rose again, grave and slow.

  “Take aim! One…two...”

  He had no time to cry three. A detonation had resounded.

  From the pistol that Caresco held, a spiral of smoke escaped.

  Bordier raised his arms in the air, half-turned, tried to struggle against the fall, then crumpled on to the dry ground, dropping his useless weapon.

  For a second, he remained kneeling on the ground, his hand clenched, reaching for the pistol. At the end of his tether, however, very pale, with a roar that brought blood to his lips, he finally fell.

  With him, faith, justice and right also collapsed.

  Thirty paces away, in the person of the surgeon, Evil remaining standing, dominating and terrible.

  There was panic. Already Ponviane was kneeling beside his friend, covering his forehead with fraternal kisses, striving to pass a breath of life through the warmth of his embrace into the dying body.

  “He’s dying!” he cried. “Help! Jean...Jean! Help!”

  With a cry of fright, he renewed his desperate appeal—and in the d
isarray of his dolor and his mercy, it was toward the man still standing that his invocation went again.

  “You! You!” he cried to Caresco. “Come see, for pity’s sake. Save my friend, my friend...my only friend.

  And something magnificent and horrible happened.

  Caresco came to his stricken adversary, had him undressed, examined the hole made by the bullet, near the right shoulder, at the precise spot where he had intended to strike.

  A flame of triumph and energy illuminated his eyes. He looked up at Savre.

  “It’s the sub-clavial artery that’s bleeding,” he said. “We can get him out of it by making the ligature. I’m going to cut through the clavicle. Bring my instruments—they’re I the carriage.”

  And while the surgeon prepared his tools for that new manifestation of his audacious skill, Savre, confronted by the hard and skeptical mask, admired without reserve the power of genius that was about to save a life, thanks to the experience acquired at the price of so much bloodshed, so many lives scorned, so many unpunished abominations.

  He found it an unexpected confirmation of his concept of the necessary evil.

  Afterword

  Why did Couvreur entitle his book Le Mal nécessaire, and why did he advertize it as the first of a trilogy entitled Les Dangers sociaux? We cannot know for sure, but there is no harm in guessing. The answer to the second question is probably that, by the time he finished writing the novel, he already intended to write Les Mancenilles, and perhaps La Source fatale too, and that the trilogy title was invented to package them. It is unlikely that Le Mal nécessaire was planned in advance to illustrate a “social danger.” In the same way, the implication of the last line of the novel—that the title relates to Savre’s thesis that good social progress typically results from historical processes involving a good deal of evil and, at least, a little madness—is probably an afterthought, the chapter in which Savre sets out his thesis being a late improvisation.