The pursuit disappeared into the unknown.
I remained alone with the immensity.
After an hour of waiting in the moonlight, I decided to leave the theater of that equivocal drama. Before doing anything else, however, I went down a path to the place that Borelli had haunted for two nights in a row, to my knowledge—and every night, in my belief.
I found his felt hat there and his Romantic cloak. Next to them, on a parcel of old clothes, easily recognizable as Madame Borelli’s, were two crutches forming a cross. There was also a large spiny seashell on the cloak: a conch.
By virtue of searching for the place where I had glimpsed the nocturnal wanderer trying to haul in the thing whose rupture had made him fall over, I ended up discovering a stake solidly planted in the sand, on the tide-line. It still retained a fine and resilient steel cord, which plunged into the sea. I pulled out about two hundred meters—all of it. It ended in a large collar, or rather a girdle—a leather girdle with a padlock, which had been cut a little while before.
As for Borelli, his body was blocking the path half way to Monte Carlo. He was lying face down, facing Monaco. Death, aided by the moonlight, was whitening his colossal back to the point of giving it a green tinge. Three parallel wounds, equidistant and in the same line, offered evidence of a single thrust of an avenging trident.
THE MAN WITH THE RAREFIED BODY
To René Martin-Guelliot13
From the hand of Dr. Sambreuil of Pontargis
The delay that Bouvancourt imposed upon me expires today, March 14, 1912. It is therefore permissible for me to relate the history of the prodigious event of which he served as the thaumaturge. It is a story as fine as a legend. One sees therein, so to speak, an electric spark relighting Aladdin’s lamp.
The friend that we are still mourning had this adventure at Pontargis, a few months after his installation there, some years before his tragic death. It is well-known that the physicist had retired there to work in a more leisurely manner and that it was in the Picard sub-prefecture that he carried out his most remarkable investigations of X-rays.
One night in the winter of 1901-02—without being equipped with either an overcoat or a hat, oddly enough—Bouvancourt was walking the pavements of Pontargis with a firm and sonorous step, with the expression of a fellow who feels extremely contented with himself.
He had kept watch from his window for the moment when the streets would be deserted, and then he had gone out for the first time in seven days—for, throughout the week, his passion for research had kept him cloistered in his laboratory, preoccupied with an imminent discovery. For seven days and seven nights—a fateful interval—he had pursued the Truth like a goddess accustomed to being hunted and skilled in evasion. She had surrendered to him at 9 p.m. Immediately, her conqueror, quivering with pride, had recovered the consciousness of his muscles and his nerves; a furious desire had taken hold of him to walk energetically, and thoughtlessly, in the open air…
In spite of the authority of his desire, however, Bouvancourt had kept watch from his window for the moment when the streets would be deserted. Then he had woken his housekeeper, Mariette, and asked her to open the door for him; and, after having convinced her of the necessity of waiting behind the door for his return, in order to undo the latch when she heard his voice—only then did he go out for the first time in seven days. And Mariette never contrived to understand why her master had gone out without a hat and an overcoat, nor why he had woken her up in order to have the door opened as he left and when he came back, in response to the sound of his voice, when he could so easily have undone the latch himself, or made use of the doorbell and a key.
Mariette was also worried about the “Morand gang”—an association of evildoers which was terrorizing the canton. The domestic, without giving any thought to the perils of a late and solitary walk, reckoned that only a boorish egotist would leave a poor woman all alone by night in a small house in the Boulevard Poincaré while the Morand gang was ravaging the Pontargisians—but Mariette knew that Bouvancourt did not like criticism, so she did not make her sentiments manifest.
The professor, therefore, was striding through the sinister desert of the pitch-black town. Everything that could be distinguished within that provincial darkness was depressingly ugly. The avenues and esplanades rivaled one another in shame with their cul-de-sacs and side-streets. The rare gaslights, with their dimly-illuminating, paltry yellow flames, gave the impression of soiling the darkness; the cold rendered you wretched; the very silence seemed lamentable, because it was nothing but the mutism of 35,000 citizens.
Bouvancourt did not give a hoot for any of that. Neither the place nor the season had any purchase on his cheerfulness. Head held high, his step resounding, he marched victoriously; a permanent smile lit up his face, sometimes being amplified into laughter. He felt as if he were Archimedes wandering through the streets of Syracuse shouting to the people: “I’ve found it!” He marched triumphantly, as if beneath the bright Sicilian Sun, in a city full of Palaces.
It was thus, with his eyes elsewhere and his mind absent, that Bouvancourt ventured into the Saint-Charles district, where someone suddenly loomed up in front of him.
Bouvancourt was brutally snatched out of his dream. He experienced a sensation of having been transported by magic to the place he perceived: a dark crossroads where four muddy streets lined by blind walls intersected. Isolated and distant, a lantern shed a little crepuscular light, limning the gallows-bird silhouette that had just surged forth.
Let me open a parenthesis at this point. The following scene lasted about a quarter of a minute. The narrator cannot reproduce it as briskly, for fear of insufficiency. He will therefore function, if you wish, in the manner of a cinematograph that is turned slowly in order that the film might be analyzed and the event decomposed.
Bouvancourt stopped dead in front of the human obstacle. His soul was the theater of a remarkably instantaneous change of viewpoint. Before the apache’s lips had moved, he had recalled all the crimes of the Morand gang. God knows that he had only scanned the story with a distracted eye, given that science was, for him, the only reality—but the fact is that, at that moment, he remembered the slightest details of every crime. Even the names of the victims came back to him as naturally as radiographic terms, and his mind’s eye fixed itself upon a frightful series of cadavers worthy of some foreign wax museum: old women with their throats cut, broken-hearted girls, charred rentiers, mutilated cashiers, all of whose biographical details he knew! Between the widow Canut, her blue features grimacing, and little Angèle Braquard, exposing the gaping wounds slashed in her thin neck, was the sexagenarian Adolphe Piat, bloated and burned to a crisp….
The cut-throat’s filthy, reeking breath got up Bouvancourt’s nose as he said: “Can you tell me what time it is, boss?”
At the same time, the physicist heard the muffled sound of footsteps approaching him from behind. Everything within him told him to back up against the nearest wall. He was not allowed to do it. Something passed before his eyes, moving downwards—something dark, which he identified immediately: it was the joined hands of his posterior enemy, which intended to perpetrate upon his person the ritual coup du Père François.
Bouvancourt, whose knowledge was not confined to physics, anticipated his destiny in a second, and saw himself strangled, held by that devil of an invisible animal, while the other went through his pockets in comfort.
The living lasso closed violently upon the professor’s Adam’s apple, and he uttered a strangled exclamation, half cry and half cough—rather incongruous, in sum, and, in any case, quite unjustified, for he had felt almost nothing, and reason alone had caused the abrupt recoil he had just effected. The offensive hands had vanished; Bouvancourt’s ears told him that the assailant behind him was in the process of falling heavily and that, although his curse was brief, it could not have been any more forceful.
“To you, Julot!” said the Père François, in a muffled roar, less
bellicose than fearful.
It’s true! It’s true! thought the scientist. It had slipped my mind!
And Julot saw Bouvancourt’s smile return.
For two seconds, but no more, the aggression was suspended. The Père François got to his feet painfully and Julot wondered whether he had really seen what had just happened—whether he had really seen his accomplice’s joined hands disappear through the intended victim’s neck, cutting through it, and yet leaving it exactly as before, atop that robust upright body, beneath that smiling head.
Julot hesitated. But…bah! That decapitation, those cutting arms, were an effect of the poor lighting, an artifact of glimmers and shadows. He pronounced a silent obscenity, which served him as a war-cry, and bent over, intending to attack Bouvancourt like a ram and butt him in the stomach.
This was done at the risk of hurling the physicist backwards on to the Père François, who had completed his painful readjustment and was meditating singular hypotheses while watching the action—but the poor fellow was not yet done with pratfalls and amazement. Scarcely had he understood Julot’s plan than he received his charge in the pit of his stomach, not without having seen his comrade passing clean though his phenomenal adversary and emerging from his back like a clown leaping through a paper hoop!
Bouvancourt burst out laughing and turned round. His two aggressors, tangled up, were writhing as each strove to be the first to get to his feet. It was Julot who succeeded. He ran off. The other followed hot on his heels, clutching his abdomen with his left hand while he made signs of the cross with his right. Both of them, however, were blaspheming madly.
“I must be daft!” murmured Bouvancourt. “I’d completely forgotten…hare-brained. To go out at night because of it, without a hat because of it, without an overcoat because of it, and not to remember it! Truly, I must be more exhausted than I thought. Let’s go to bed, then. But first, where am I?”
His course had taken him to the edge of town. One of the walls was that of the cemetery—a circumstance that explained the superstitious terror of the Père François.
The nocturnal stroller headed for his lodgings, with a considerably less swaggering gait. He went back in—but I am not sufficiently well-informed to offer the most meager description of what he did then. I only know in broad terms, and I would prefer to report that second-hand explanation as I received it from his own lips—at the end of the story.
At any rate, the following morning, at about 8 a.m., while I was passing by, I rang the doorbell of the physicist’s apartment on the first floor of 25 Boulevard Poincaré. As usual, I went in without standing on ceremony.
Bouvancourt seemed put out by my visit—and I hasten to say that, on that day, I saw no evidence of the nocturnal attack. I found him in his bedroom. He must have got up earlier, unless he hadn’t gone to bed at all, the bed having been made, or having not been unmade. Disquiet was written all over his face. Standing in front of the clock, my friend was studying it with an anxiety that could not have been feigned. Something—an unaccustomed untidiness…slovenliness, even—had overtaken his entire person.
I offered him my hand.
“No, not today,” he said, excusing himself with a snigger. “I shan’t shake your hand, Sambreuil. Gout, you know. I’ve got very sensitive fingers. You can’t imagine how painful it is. Then again, old chap, your visit is inconvenient this morning. Forgive me, but could you possibly come back this afternoon? You don’t have any urgent communication to make? No? Well, see you soon, then? You have no idea…until then, my friend, and all my most humble excuses…au revoir…”
Being received in that manner threw me into a dark and fearful astonishment. I had observed that Bouvancourt had carefully stood to one side, with his back to the light, as if he were contagious. Normally, he escorted me to the top of the stairs; this time, I left him in his bedroom, alone with the clock. He kicked the door shut behind me.
I was filled with alarm and grief.
At 4 p.m., as soon as my medical consultation had concluded, I hastened to the Boulevard Poincaré.
Everything had resumed its normal appearance. Bouvancourt was waiting for me, in order to take a walk along the canal—the canal that was to prove deadly to him! I still recall that he was wearing his hazelnut-brown overcoat and his chestnut-brown felt hat. The professor’s handshake crushed my finger-bones, but that grip could not have made me happier.
We started out. I expected a clarification…I solicited one by making allusions…but my friend remained coy. There was, moreover, no gaiety in his manner. I suspected that he had suffered a disappointment. I presumed that his current project had hit a snag, and did not insist any further.
A week later, Madame Sambreuil and I were eating lunch when Bouvancourt burst into the dining-room. His distress astonished us.
I gave him two glasses of ratafia, one after another, which revived him. After a certain number of sighs and exclamations—such as “Oh, my God!...Oh God, is it possible! Me! Me! My dear doctor...! Oh, Madame, if you only knew!” and so on—the excellent fellow dissolved in tears and began to tell us what you have already read, just as you have read it.
A few hours earlier—it was, I think, 9 a.m.—Bouvancourt had begun his day’s work in a rather bad temper, because an employee of the railway, carrying a crate of laboratory equipment, had bumped into him awkwardly, bruising his shoulder. Even so, he had immediately set about unpacking the precious glassware contained in the crate and arranging them on his laboratory shelves.
The job was approaching completion when an exceptionally handsome youth came in without having himself announced, closed and locked the room’s three doors, put the keys in his pocket, and came forward.
Bouvancourt was kneeling beside the crate, in the straw, and looked up at him in amazement.
“Monsieur,” said the unknown, “May I introduce myself, at least!” His voice was soft, musical, amiable and polite. “I’m Morand…you know...of the Morand gang.”
Bouvancourt leapt to his feet, not merely troubled at being at the rogue’s mercy, but also astounded to see the features of a student of good family and to recognize in that gracious bandit, relieved of his disguise, the porter that had bumped into him a little while ago.
“Have no fear!” said the intruder, with an exquisite laugh, so feminine and so child-like that my friend scented subterfuge and trickery. “Have no fear! I don’t mean to do you any harm!”
“What? Are you really Morand? Are you the man who had the teller at the Crédit Foncier knocked unconscious? Are you the author of the sextuple murder in Vautremont?” Are you the crook…”
His tone acid and his face stern, the Antinous replied: “Yes, Monsieur Bouvancourt, that’s me. I have no reason to hide it from my future accomplice. For it’s also me who’s responsible for the theft of 500,000 francs from the Comptoir d’Escompte de Pontargis.”
“Eh? What are you saying? I didn’t know…when did that robbery…”
“That robbery will be committed tomorrow night, my dear Monsieur Bouvancourt. And it’s you who’ll help me carry it out.”
“Me!”
“You’ll help me,” the youth continued, with an expression of vice and cruelty. “You’ll help me, I tell you. As true as my name’s Morand. Sit down, and let’s have a little chat.”
The master of the house sat down at his guest’s bidding. Dominated by the gaze of a tiger, he thought of the youth of imperial brutes—Nero, Caracalla, Tiberius—and accepted that this was the terrible gang-leader.
The latter continued: “Two of my employees have given me an incredible report. A strange humiliation was inflicted on them on Tuesday, at about midnight, near the cemetery. The arms of the first, suddenly becoming yataghans, went through a certain stroller without doing him the slightest damage. As for the second, he passed through the supernatural individual, for whom that perception was sufficient to make him to break out in diabolical laughter.
“This late stroller, Monsieur could not be anyon
e else but the magician Bouvancourt. I know the Pontargeois directory; it includes but one sorcerer’s name—yours. And, as the date of my baccalaureate in science is not very distant, I understood that, by the intervention of radiography, you had discovered a means of making yourself traversable, as ungraspable as a man of gas…or liquid…”
“It’s not that, exactly,” remarked Bouvancourt, with a thin smile. “The comparison…”
“Is of no importance!” declared the perverse Adonis. “The interest, for me lies not in the cause, but in the effect. The cause, however….X-rays, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Bouvancourt admitted, carried away by his favorite hobby-horse. “Oh, nothing’s simpler, in principle. The problem was this: to endow sold bodies—opaque or transparent—with the qualities of penetration that dark light enjoys. To put it another way, to treat these solids in such a way that they could traverse other, untreated solids, and, in consequence, could be traversed by them—which amounts to the same thing.
“To do that, it was necessary to succeed in impregnating them, if I might put it thus, with dark light, in order that they would be profoundly modified, at the level of their most arcane molecules, thus acquiring the property of the invasive fluid—which is to say, the property of traversing masses without disturbing them…without disturbing them, for example in the fashion of a swimmer moving through water or as we move through the atmosphere, but passing though by a sort of immediate osmosis, like two regiments intersecting, man by man, without being subject to dilatation. That came back to varying the porosity of matter, which is never dense enough not to be imaginable as a troop of atoms.
“Well, the other day—Tuesday—I was charged with this…fluid…as a condenser is charged with electricity. To be strictly accurate, though, the…fluid…is not merely dark light, for it’s necessary that the treated body should also penetrate substances that X-rays cannot pass through, or only pass through with difficulty. So…”
The Doctored Man Page 5
