In spite of everything it was just as well that I went back to Raney next day, because of Bébert, who fell sick just then. My colleague Frolichon had just gone off on his vacation. Bébert’s aunt hesitated, then she asked me to take care of her nephew after all, probably because I charged less than any other doctor she knew.
It was after Easter. The weather was looking up. The first south winds were passing over Raney, the ones that blew all the soot from the factories down on our windowpanes.
Bébert was sick for weeks and weeks. I went to see him twice a day. The neighborhood people would wait for me outside the lodge, pretending to be just passing by, and on the doorsteps of their houses. It gave them something to do. People would come a long way to find out if he was better or worse. The sunshine has too many things to pass through; it never gives the street anything better than an autumn light full of regrets and clouds.
People gave me lots of advice in connection with Bébert. The fact is, the whole neighborhood took an interest in his case. Some thought well, others poorly, of my intelligence. When I went into the lodge, a critical, rather hostile, and most of all crushingly stupid silence set in. The lodge was always full of the aunt’s cronies, it smelled strongly of petticoats and rabbit piss. Each had her own favorite doctor, who was cleverer and more learned than any other. I presented only one advantage, but one that’s hard to forgive, I charged hardly anything. A free-gratis doctor is bad for the reputation of a patient and his family, however poor they may be.
Bébert wasn’t delirious yet, he had just lost all desire to move. He was losing weight by the day. A bit of yellow, flabby flesh still clung to his bones and quivered from top to bottom every time his heart beat. He’d got so thin in over a month of illness that his heart seemed to be all over his body. He’d look at me with a lucid smile when I came to see him. Sweetly he ran a temperature of 102, then of 103, and there he lay with a pensive look on his face for days and weeks.
After a while Bébert’s aunt had shut up and stopped bothering us. She had said everything she knew. That took the wind out of her sails, so she’d go and blubber in one corner of her lodge after another. Grief had come to her when she ran out of words, and she didn’t seem to know what to do with it. She’d try to wipe it off with her handkerchief, but it came back in her throat all mixed with tears, and she’d start all over again. She’d get it all over her and manage to be a little dirtier than usual. That would upset her and she’d cry out: “Oh dear! Oh dear!” That was all. She had cried so much she was exhausted, her arms would fall to her sides, and she’d stand there in front of me, absolutely bewildered.
But then after all she’d go back into her grief and give herself a jolt and start sobbing again. These comings and goings in her misery went on for weeks. I couldn’t dispel the feeling that this illness would end badly. It was a kind of malignant typhoid that baffled all my efforts, baths, serum, dry diet, vaccines … Nothing helped. I did everything I could think of … all in vain. Bébert was going, being carried away irresistibly, smiling all the while. He was high up, balanced on top of his fever, and I was down below making a fool of myself. Naturally a lot of people were advising the aunt, pressing her to fire me in no uncertain terms and call in another, more imposing and more experienced doctor in a hurry.
The incident of the girl “with the responsibilities” had gone the rounds and been liberally commented on. The whole neighborhood was gargling with it.
But since the other doctors, once informed of the nature of Bébert’s illness, showed no eagerness to take the case, I was kept on in the end. As long as Bébert had fallen to my lot, my colleagues figured, I might as well see him through.
All I could do was go to the bistrot now and then and phone various doctors in the Paris hospitals, with whom I was more or less acquainted, and ask those sage, widely respected luminaries what they would do if faced with a case of typhoid like the one that was driving me mad. They all gave me excellent, ineffectual advice, but all the same it pleased me to hear them making an effort free of charge for the benefit of the unknown child I had taken under my wing. After a while you start taking pleasure in the merest trifles, the small consolations life deigns to give us.
While I was busying myself with such subtleties, Bébert’s aunt was collapsing on every chair and staircase in the house; she’d emerge from her daze only to eat. But she never missed a meal. Her neighbors wouldn’t have let her forget. They watched over her. They stuffed her between sobs. “It’ll keep your strength up!” they declared. She even began to put on weight.
Speaking of Brussels sprouts, the smell rose to orgiastic heights at the peak of Bébert’s illness. It was the season. Everyone was making her presents of Brussels sprouts, ready cooked and steaming hot. “It’s true,” she was glad to admit, “they give me strength. And besides, they make me urinate.”
Before bedtime, because of the doorbell, so as to sleep lightly and hear the very first ring, she’d fill herself full of coffee. That way the tenants wouldn’t wake Bébert by ringing two or three times. Passing by the house in the evening, I’d go in to see if maybe it was all over. She’d speculate out loud: “Don’t you think it may have been the rum and camomile tea he drank at the fruit store the day of the bicycle race that made him sick?” That idea had been plaguing her from the start. The stupid fool.
“Camomile!” Bébert murmured faintly, an echo submerged in his fever. Why try to tell her different? I’d go through the two or three professional motions she expected of me, and then I’d go and face the night, not at all pleased with myself, because, like my mother, I could never feel entirely innocent of any horrible thing that happened.
About the seventeenth day I decided that it might not be a bad idea to drop in at the Joseph Bioduret Institute* and ask them what they thought about a typhoid case of this kind. Maybe they’d give me a bit of advice or recommend some vaccine. That way, if Bébert were to die, I’d have done everything possible, tried everything, however out of the way, and then perhaps I wouldn’t feel eternally guilty. At about eleven o’clock one morning I arrived at the Institute near La Villette at the other end of Paris. First they sent me wandering through laboratories and more laboratories, looking for a man of science. There wasn’t a soul in those laboratories at that hour, neither laymen nor men of science, only various objects in wild disorder, the gutted bodies of small animals, cigarette butts, chipped gas jets, cases and jars with mice suffocating inside them, retorts, bladders, broken stools, books, dust, and more cigarette butts, which, mingled with the effluvia of the urinals, made up the prevailing smell. Since I was early, I thought while I was at it, I’d go and visit the tomb of that great scientist, Joseph Bioduret, which was right there in the basement of the Institute, in with the gold and marble. A bourgeoiso-Byzantine fantasy in the best of taste! The collection was taken on your way out of the crypt, and the guard was grumbling because someone had slipped him a Belgian coin. In the last half-century the shining example of this Bioduret had led any number of young people to choose the scientific career. And the scientific career had produced as many failures as the Conservatory. After a certain number of years of failure, scientists turn out to be pretty much alike. In the mass graves of the great debacle a Doctor of Medicine is as good as a “Prix de Rome.” The only difference is that they don’t take the bus at exactly the same time of day. That’s all.
I had to wait quite a long while in the garden of the Institute, a combination of prison yard and city square, with flowers carefully lined up along malignantly decorated walls.
At last some underlings began to turn up. Several, dragging their feet listlessly, were carrying provisions from the nearby market in large shopping bags. Then, in small, unshaven, whispering groups, the men of science came sauntering through the gate, more slowly and diffidently than their humble assistants, and dispersed down different corridors, scraping the paint off the walls as they passed. Gray-haired, umbrella-carrying schoolboys, stupefied by the pedantic ro
utine and intensely revolting experiments, riveted by starvation wages for their whole adult lives to these little microbe kitchens, there to spend interminable days warming up mixtures of vegetable scrapings, asphyxiated guinea pigs, and other nondescript garbage.
They themselves, when all’s said and done, were nothing but monstrous old rodents in overcoats. Glory, in our time, smiles only on the rich, men of science or not. All those plebeians of Research had to keep them going was their fear of losing their niches in this heated, illustrious, and compartmented garbage pail. What meant most to them was the title of official scientist, thanks to which the pharmacists of the city still trusted them more or less to analyse, for the most niggardly pay incidentally, their customers’ urine and sputum. The slimy wages of science.
Arriving in his compartment, the methodic researcher would spend a few moments gazing ritually at the bilious, decaying viscera of last week’s rabbit, which was on classic and permanent display in one corner of the room, a putrid font. When the smell became really intolerable, another rabbit, would be sacrificed, but not before, because of the fanatic thrift of Professor Jaunisset,* who was then Secretary General of the Institute.
Thanks to this thrift, some of the rotting animals gave rise to unbelievable by-products and derivatives. It’s all a matter of habit. Some of the more practiced laboratory technicians had become so accustomed to the smell of putrefaction that they would have had no objection to cooking in an operational coffin. These modest auxiliaries of exalted scientific research sometimes outdid the thrift of Professor Jaunisset himself, taking advantage of the Bunsen burners to cook themselves countless ragouts and other, still riskier concoctions.
After absently examining the viscera of the ritual guinea pig and rabbit, the men of science slowly proceeded to the second act of their scientific daily life, the smoking of cigarettes. Thus they strove to neutralize the ambient stench and their boredom with tobacco smoke, and managed, from butt to butt, to get through the day. At five o’clock they put the various putrefactions back in the ramshackle incubator cabinet to keep them warm. Octave, the technician, hid the string beans he had cooked behind a newspaper to get them safely past the concierge. Subterfuges. Taking them home to Gargan all ready for supper. The man of science, his master, was still writing a little something, diffidently, doubtingly in one corner of his laboratory book, with a view to a forthcoming and utterly pointless paper that he would feel obliged to present before long to some infinitely impartial and disinterested Academy and that would serve to justify his presence at the Institute and the meager advantages it conferred.
A true man of science takes at least twenty years on an average to make the great discovery, that is, to convince himself that one man’s lunacy is not necessarily another man’s delight, and that all of us here below are bored with the bees in our neighbors’ bonnets.
The coldest, most rational scientific madness is also the most intolerable. But when a man has acquired a certain ability to subsist, even rather scantily, in a certain niche with the help of a few grimaces, he must either keep at it or resign himself to dying the death of a guinea pig. Habits are acquired more quickly than courage, especially the habit of filling one’s stomach.
I ransacked the Institute for Parapine, I’d come all the way from Raney to see him, so naturally I kept on looking. It was no small order. I made several false starts, hesitating a long while before choosing among so many corridors and doors.
Parapine was an old bachelor, he never ate lunch and I doubt if he ate dinner more than two or three times a week, but then enormously, with the frenzy of the Russian student, all of whose outlandish ways he had retained.
Parapine was an undisputed eminence in his special field. He knew all there was to know about typhoid in animals as well as human beings. His reputation went back twenty years to the day when certain German authors claimed to have isolated the Eberthella in the vaginal excreta of an eighteen-month-old girl, so creating an enormous stir in the Halls of Truth. Only too delighted to take up the challenge in the name of the National Institute, Parapine had outdone those Teutonic braggarts by breeding the same microbes, now in its pure form, in the sperm of a seventy-two-year-old invalid. Instantly famous, he managed to hold the limelight for the rest of his life by publishing a few unreadable columns in various medical journals. This he had done without difficulty ever since his day of audacity and good fortune.
The serious scientific public trusted him implicitly and consequently had no need to read him. If those people were to start getting critical, no further progress would be possible. They would spend a whole year over every page.
When I came to the door of his cell, Serge Parapine was spitting steady streams into all four corners of his laboratory, with a grimace of such disgust that it made you wonder. Parapine shaved now and then, but he always had enough hair on his cheeks to make him look like an escaped convict. He was always shivering or at least he seemed to be, though he never removed his overcoat, which presented a large assortment of spots and still more of dandruff, which he would scatter far and wide with little flicks of his fingernails, at the same time bringing his always oscillating forelock back into position over his red-and-green nose.
In the course of my laboratory work in medical school, Parapine had given me some instruction in the use of the microscope and had shown me unquestionable kindness on several occasions. I hoped he had not forgotten me completely since those remote days and that he might consent to give me valuable advice in connection with Bébert, with whose case I was really obsessed.
Undoubtedly, I was much more interested in preventing Bébert from dying than if he had been an adult. You never mind very much when an adult passes on. If nothing else, you say to yourself, it’s one less stinker on earth, but with a child you can never be so sure. There’s always the future.
Once acquainted with my difficulties, Parapine asked nothing better than to help me and to orient my perilous therapy, but unfortunately, in twenty years, he had learned so many, so diverse, and so often contradictory things about typhoid that by that time he was just about unable to formulate any clear and definite opinion concerning that most commonplace ailment and its treatment.
“First of all, my dear colleague,” he said. “Do you believe in serums? Huh? Give me your honest opinion … And vaccines? … What do you really think? … Some of the best minds today have no use for vaccines at all … That of course is a bold way of thinking …Yes, indeed … but even so … in the last analysis … Don’t you think there’s a certain truth in that sort of negativism? …”
The sentences issued from his mouth in terrifying bursts, amid avalanches of tremendous R’s.
While he was struggling like a lion against other enraged and desperate hypotheses, Jaunisset, the illustrious Secretary General of the Institute, who was still alive at the time, passed our windows frowning superciliously.
At the sight of him, Parapine turned if possible paler than ever and abruptly changed the subject in his haste to show me all the disgust aroused in him by the mere daily sight of this Jaunisset, who was glorified by just about everyone else. In half a second he disposed of Jaunisset as a crook and maniac of the first water, accusing him of enough monstrous, unprecedented, and secret crimes to fill a penal colony for a century.
I was powerless to stop Parapine from giving me hundreds of hate-ridden pointers about the clownish trade of medical research, which he was obliged to practice if he wanted to eat. This hatred of his was more precise, more scientific you might say, than the hatreds emanating from other men occupying similar positions in offices or shops.
He spoke in a very loud voice, and I was amazed at his outspokenness. His technician was listening to us. He, too, had finished his bit of cookery and was still moving about, for form’s sake, between incubator and test tubes, but he had grown so accustomed to listening to Parapine pouring out his more or less daily maledictions that he had come to regard these tirades, however extravagant,
as absolutely academic and meaningless. Certain little private experiments that this technician pursued with great seriousness in one of the laboratory’s incubators struck him, on the other hand, as prodigiously and deliciously instructive compared to Parapine’s outpourings. Parapine’s rages in no way tempered his enthusiasm. Before leaving, he tenderly, scrupulously shut the door of the incubator on his private microbes, as if it were a tabernacle.
“Did you notice that technician of mine, my dear colleague?” said Parapine as soon as he had gone. “Did you notice that old fool? He’s been cleaning up my rubbish for almost thirty years, and all he ever hears people talk about is science, but that most abundantly and sincerely … well, far from being disgusted, he, unlike everyone else in the whole place, has come to believe in it! After handling my cultures for years, he thinks they’re marvelous! He dotes on them … The most meaningless of my buffooneries enchants him! Isn’t it the same with all religions? Hasn’t the priest stopped believing in God years ago, while his sacristan goes on believing … Heart and soul! … It’s sickening! … That old fool carries absurdity to the point of aping the dress and goatee of the illustrious Joseph Bioduret! Did you notice? … Between you and me, the great Bioduret wasn’t so very different from my technician except for his worldwide reputation and the intensity of his manias … That giant of experimental science with his mania for rinsing his bottles with care and observing the hatching out of moths in incredible detail, has always struck me as monstrously vulgar … Take away his prodigious pettiness, his housekeeping and, I ask you, what’s left to admire about the great Bioduret? All right, I’ll tell you: The hateful look of a malignant, cantankerous concierge. That’s all. In his twenty years of membership in the Academy he had ample time to exhibit his vile, contemptible character … nearly everyone hated him, he quarreled … and what quarrels! … with just about everyone in sight. The man was an ingenious megalomaniac, nothing more …”
Journey to the End of the Night Page 29
