“Tel me, my lad, do you want me to break something?”
His blood was boiling as of old, and he had already raised his fist. They threw themselves upon him, and immobilized him. Two minutes later, policemen took hold of the protester—and, at the same time, his maid, who tried to defend him with her fingernails.
“Move! You can explain at the station.”
As a result, the interment of the pseudo-Théophraste Lapastille could not proceed with the magnificent calmness for which the countrywoman had hoped. The only people who savored the ostentation of the ceremony were three art students astonished by so much luxury, the concierge and the local dairywoman, a relative of the Nymph’s. No one marched behind the coffin of the unknown corpse. The three art students having taken their places in one carriage and the concierge and the dairywoman in another, two carriages remained empty, which did not even tempt the idlers attracted by Lapastille’s second abduction.
Chapter IV
A soldier deserts in time of war and renounces his fatherland; a political amnesty brings him back. A conspirator against the security of the nation is expelled from the country; a change of regime renders him titles and honors. But if a worthy dead man who does not die wants to reclaim his place is society, he experiences as much difficulty as a bird caught by birdlime trying to escape from the trap.
At the police station, after waiting six hours, the painter and the maidservant appeared before the Commissaire de Police. He was a man much preoccupied by a skin disease, which he was having treated by a pedicurist. He only called in at the office once a day to sign documents and left again immediately. This time, the affair being of sufficient importance to be made public by the press, he was obliged to listen to his new clients. As soon as Lapastille began his explanation, however, he winked at his secretary, who slipped away and soon came back in the company of a small clean-shaven man.
“What, luck, Doctor,” said the Commissaire to the latter. “You’ve arrived at just the right time. Monsieur is telling me a surgical story that will interest you. Begin again, Monsieur, I beg you.”
Bravely, honestly and calmly, Théophraste Lapastille repeated his narration. Whenever he forgot a detail, Mélanie reminded him of it.
The doctor and the Commissaire listened, like men who assimilate easily. Intelligent fellows, the painter said to himself.
“All that is perfectly plausible,” declared the physician.
“You’re going to let me go, then?” said Lapastille to the guardian of order.
“But of course! Right away! I’ll even have you taken home in a carriage.”
“I live nearby.”
“No matter. You’ll take advantage of the two taxis that take my agents on errands. I owe you that. They’re very comfortable. You can travel in one and your domestic in the other.”
“You’re a good fellow, Monsieur le Commissaire,” said the prisoner, thankfully.
“And it’s necessary, into the bargain,” said the Commissaire, addressing the doctor who was writing.
Confused and grateful, the painter separated from Mélanie. “See you soon!”
And he went outside, breathing the air of liberty joyfully. Two policemen were already beside ha taxi, holding the door open. They gave him the honor of the back seat. One of them got in beside him, the other occupied the folding seat—and drive, chauffeur!
The chauffeur, however, took a route that did not go anywhere near Théophraste’s house.
“Oh! Where are we going?”
“We’re making a call in the neighborhood first. Don’t worry. We’ll bring you back.”
The vehicle accelerated along less crowded roads. The detour extended immeasurably.
Nice! Théophraste reflected. They’re taking me by the scenic route. It’s obvious that it’s at public expense! Grateful as he was for the kindness of the police, he was careful to refrain from uttering any criticism aloud.
When the auto crossed the barrière, however, without taking the trouble to declare its fuel, and when, slowing down, it prepared to go through the open gate of a property guarded by an old servant of the Assistance Publique, Théophraste understood what was happening.
“With the lunatics! Bunch of swine!”
He struggled, as frantically as when doing the boiling crab before his funeral. He tried to jump out of the door, but two hands of steel held him down.
“Help me, Tornada! Help!” he howled, to the echoes of the place.
Whether one calls certain ripostes to invocations that seem destined to be lost in the wilderness Coincidence, Hazard, Providence or Fate, it is a patent fact that in this adventure, an unexpected power intervened at the exact moment when the auto was about to go into the lunatic asylum. It intervened under the auspices of an extraordinary vehicle, armored like a tank, spurred like a cruiser and furnished with portholes like a steamship, which, impelled a hundred horsepower and vertiginously launched, swerved crazily toward the taxi and—to translate Théophraste’s thought “rammed it good and hard.”
The impact was catastrophic, crushing the rear end of the weaker vehicle and causing it to spin around. In circumstances of that sort, it’s every man for himself and system D for everyone.9 The agents let go of their prey, who was the first to get out on to the road.
“Let’s go, old Phraste, let’s go!” shouted a vast curly beard from the front porthole.
Old Phraste, this time all in favor of his third abduction, plunged into the assault vehicle, which had already turned round and was ready to head back to the barrière.
“Nothing broken?”
“Just a few cuts,” said Lapastille, wiping his hand, lacerated by broken glass.
“Take care of Mélanie, then.”
“Mélanie?”
“I’m here!” quavered a voice issuing from a mass of blankets, which hid a body extended full length on the floor.
Théophraste lifted up the package and uncovered his maidservant. Poor Nymph! She had been copiously roughed up by a similar crash. From a swollen cheek she brought out two disarticulated teeth, and one of her arms was wrapped in her handkerchief—which did not prevent her from cursing.
“It’s nothing—I’ll repair it. Couldn’t let the Inquisitors get you!”
Ten minutes later, after some hot verbal exchanges with drivers overtaken in defiance of all the rules and pedestrians brushed by death, the trio appeared before the handsome prosecutor Villand-Dupuis. He knew what had happened already, thanks to the telephone.
Tornada did not take off his hat.
“Come on, Monsieur le Procureur, what’s all this about? Your cops are arresting my patients now? Trying to pass them off as lunatics? They want to lock them up?”
“I don’t understand your protest, Doctor.”
“But it’s perfectly simple. My friend Phraste, here present: Théophraste Lapastille, the painter of nymphs—a misunderstood genius, Monsieur le Procureur, I tell you, as someone who knows something about anatomy...”
“Oh, that story again!”
“Yes, Monsieur le Procureur, while awaiting others. Well, Phraste was not only about to be buried, to please Granive, but was banged up, was taken to Charenton. Is this kind of thing going to end soon?”
The handsome prosecutor was so impressed by the scientist’s prestige that he feared an attack. He reached for the bell.
“Don’t call!” said the surgeon, calming down. “It’s best that this remains between us, until I’ve realized…the consequence.”
“All right, Doctor, let’s explain. It’s always best to say calm.”
Villand-Dupuis struck a reflective pose, his elbows on his desk and his head in his hands. He was afraid of Tornada, It was not the first time the scientist had tangled with the law, and he always emerged victorious. Furthermore, the interest that every moderately cultured man accords to the prodigies of science also prescribed that he should listen attentively.
Tornada took his hat off and sat down.
“Here it is. He d
ied, my old Phraste. He was no more, I can say, than fodder for necrophages. I take him home. I reinvigorate him...”
“By what method?”
“That’s my business.”
“I don’t doubt your science, Doctor, but it’s still necessary, is order for me to believe you and to set these good people free—in order that, if necessary, I can facilitate the reestablishment of a civil status, thus contributing myself to making a dead man into a living one—that a plausible explanation permits me...”
“All right,” said Tornada. “Anyway, given that I’m disposed, after this first result, to continue my experiments, it’s probable that secrecy will soon no longer be possible...” He smoothed his beard proudly and went on: “You’re aware of the recent applications of biological chemistry to human rejuvenation?”
“Granive’s vitalizing serum? Yes, Doctor. I’ve even had personal recourse to it. It’s a famous remedy.”
“Famous for its inefficacy,” sniggered Tornada. “A sucker trap. And the result of a theft, moreover. I nearly came to talk to you about it, because I’m the discoverer of Micrococcus vitalisans, of which Granive makes use for his composition—except that the scoundrel doesn’t know that in order to thrive, my culture needs a single gram per hundred cubic centimeters of a certain substance, and the aid of a certain fluid...”
“What substance? What fluid?”
“I’ll keep that to myself,” said Tornada, his hands on his abdomen.
In fact, that information was not of much interest to the magistrate. “Let’s pass on to the serum,” he said.
“No, let’s not pass on. I intend—without, however, giving you the formula—to give you a glimpse of how a singly drop of vitalisans…the authentic vitalisans, mine…injected into the heart, and concurrently into the cephalorachidian liquid, and then diffused throughout the organism by the action of my fluid on the nervous system, renders every biological cell eternal and, by virtue of that fact, revivifies all the matter!”
The grave expression of the prosecutor, who was listening conscientiously but without really giving the impression that he understood, instead of making the scientist indignant or maintaining him in his abstract explanations, suddenly turned him in a humorous direction. Everything about Tornada was paradoxical, anything was a pretext for him to escape the serious. Besides which, prodigiously equipped when it was a matter of science, he was went off the rails with surprising suddenness when it came to communication with his fellows. His language testified to that. The presence of his friend Théophraste, an old companion of his facetiousness, was a further incitement.
“I can see that you don’t get it—but you’re a poet. Yes, I know, I know. I’ve read your verses addressed to the beautiful Madame Tartempion. You signed them with an anagram, du Puylanville. So I think it’s preferable to talk in literary terms, since I can do that too.”
He stood up a struck the pose of a guitarist,
“Let’s sing! The river of life flows backwards! I hold the amaranth branch! My blazon is azur, with a silver phoenix in an immortality of gules! For once the torch is relit, the animator of microbes gives way to the cutter. Yes, everything that weakens in the organism, destroyed by wear and tear or corrupted by an infection, whether it be the brain, liver, kidney, heart, spleen, etc.—all the gizzards, in sum—I replace with healthy pieces detached from elsewhere, as one changes the parts in an old banger. I’m also a first-class mechanic, Monsieur le Procureur!”
“That I can easily believe, Doctor,” said Villand-Dupuis, anxiously, “but where do you get these pieces taken from elsewhere? Do you, perhaps, for the needs of the case, require…victims?”
“Oh, these Torquemadas, always sniffing crime!” Tornada joked. “No, my dear prosecutor, I haven’t required any victims—not human victims, at any rate—for these substitutions, sometimes exchanges, I obtain from...”
“Where?”
“From pigs, Monsieur le Procureur. From pigs, and also from apes, our nearest relatives in the scale of beings. Our brothers, superior to us, I dare say, in those senses with which they are better endowed than us: sensibility, reason and intelligence.”
“So, Doctor, of that painter who died...”
“Who was quasi-dead!”
“You made?”
“This gigolo, my dear prosecutor.”
Villand-Dupuis shrugged his shoulders. The sly, insulting tone of his interlocutor cast him into doubt and suspicion. Was it not a matter of some ruse for the possession of the famous inheritance whose secret had been delivered to the examining magistrate by the investigation? Why not lock up these lunatics—or perhaps impostors—immediately, and see later...
Again he reached for the bell, but Tornada had anticipated him.
“You’re about to do something stupid, my lad! It’ll get you into trouble. Come on, one doesn’t treat Tornada like some poor quack. What do the others, my colleagues, do? They invent paltry remedies, which support a degenerate race with difficulty. They are, moreover, sometimes the sowers of malady; one isn’t always wrong to call them morticoles.10 Whereas I make new; I change the mechanical components; I change the very essence of being by immunizing it against maladies. In sum I cultivate life—true, healthy, radiant life. I am the Biocole!”
Delighted with his neologism, he patted Théophraste on the shoulder. Then he went on: “Come on, my dear prosecutor, I want to be a generous prince, and I’m making you a precise and demonstrative proposal: would you like me to mutate you into a Romeo? No? The silken ladder, it wouldn’t make you smile to climb it? Your usher too—shall I make an adolescent out of that debris? Nor him? Who, then? Who?”
He turned to Mélanie. She held up her hand, and spat out a jet of saliva. She accepted.
“My God! In front of a committee…,” said the prosecutor, hesitantly, grasping a means of deferring the poisonous affair.
“Oh no! No committee! No officials! They’d rob me. Surveillance, day and night, of my laboratory, if you wish—a cordon of agents, police dogs, searchlights, anything you want to dispose to prevent trickery—but we go alone, the old woman and I, into my operating theater…I open her up alone, all alone…sheltered from pontiffs! And in a week’s time, she’ll emerge from my hands, as sprightly as a spring chicken in Montparno, where she lives. Come on, do you accept?”
“I can’t do it under my own authority…I’ll refer it to my Minister.”
The prosecutor went away in order to telephone. He came back after a long interval.
“The Garde des Sceaux was in council at the Élysée. I had difficulty getting hold of him. Eventually, I got him. First, he asked me whether it was me who was a little...”
“Touched?”
“If you wish. But when he heard that it concerned Professor Tornada, he said that it was necessary not to be astonished by anything. He then referred it to the Prime Minister, who referred it in his turn to the President of the Republic. I soon had the entire government on the line...”
“It’s worth the trouble.”
“Yes, because if…oh, damn! In brief, those Messieurs authorized the proof, under the external surveillance of the Sûreté.”
“External, that’s agreed. It’s preferable for everyone that your policemen don’t come in. I might send you back as a squad of old harridans…or chimpanzees…or companions of Saint Anthony.”
Exactly a week later, at nine o’clock in the morning, the young painter Théophraste Lapastille, clad in his old scarlet toga, was in his studio, painting a nymph on the edge of a spring, caressing a lily under the shade of spreading branches.
He was in despair. The painting was coming along very well, but Théophraste could not succeed in giving birth to the dear image, once so profoundly engraved in his memory that, even in the era immediately preceding his last days, he could still superimpose youth and beauty on his maidservant’s wrinkles and rotundities.
At first he attributed his impotence to his transubstantiation, which must have disturbed something in hi
s brain, but on reflection, he admitted that he was extremely anxious about Mélanie, and that she was the real cause of his incapacity.
What had become of her, the old dear, during the week that he had heard nothing from her, the prohibition of approaching having been observed by him as it had by everyone else. Had the operation she had undergone been successful? Was she even alive? And if she was alive, having received organs extracted from animals, in what form would she reappear? So many questions, which Tornada’s sorcery rendered anguishing!
Théophraste felt his body. He often carried out such tactile examinations since hearing the physiological explanation given by his friend to the prosecutor. He wondered what he possessed of…others. He regretted that no internal mirror permitted him to check out his depths.
“No, it’s definitely not going well today.”
He renounced his labor. And suddenly, his heart began to pound. A rumor coming from outside was getting louder. He opened the widow and leaned out. There was a crowd blocking the street, of people running, arms raised, stopping in front of the building, and jostling one another in order to see the ravishing silhouette of a woman getting out of the famous armored automobile.
“It’s her!”
He bounded outside and stood, suffocating, on the landing. Then, when he saw her appear, as fresh, as sprightly, as golden and as blooming as she had been forty years before, he accomplished a terrible whirlwind motion with his arms, to drive the cortege of neighbors, journalists, concierges and policemen away from her.
“Get back! Get out! Leave us alone!”
He was not obeyed. Threatened with a general tumble, however, the followers hesitated to climb the stairs. He took advantage of that to go down the few steps separating him from the recreated Nymph and bearing her away with the fury of a Roman carrying off a Sabine woman—a comparison warranted by his scarlet toga.
The Exploits of Professor Tornada (Vol. 3) Page 5
