Mourgue, the headmaster of the school, had the external appearance of an academic about 37 years old. He had a mottled complexion, a brown beard and long hair. His keen eyes looked through a pince-nez. His manner of dress was negligent. He was reputed—I learned this detail, among others, later—to be a rather distinguished physiologist, impeded in his research by an incessant lack of funds, for which he strove to make up, ingeniously, with stubborn ardor. The man was, in fact, burdened by a terrible vice: gambling—and the casino in the neighboring town swallowed up the profits that his establishment produced as they came in. Such was Mourgue. We did not detest him, by any means, for he treated us benevolently, taking into consideration all the failings of this world. His mother, who had been Madame Mourgue, was now named Madame Chablas, by reason of her remarriage.
Monsieur and Madame Chablas lived at the school. Madame Chablas, who doted on her son and feared the effects that his incurable passion might have on him, had sworn not to leave him until the supreme moment when she would be obliged to quite the world altogether. We had nicknamed Monsieur and Madame Chablas “Philemon and Baucis.”38 They were both 59 years old and even though they were almost sexagenarians they continued to be unashamedly fond of one another. That love, although quite touching, had something slightly ridiculous about it, which its amorous aspect did not diminish at all.
Edgar Chablas—Philemon—was an aged dandy, very well-groomed, with dyed and pomaded hair. He trimmed his jet black moustache carefully and wore his beard in the style of Jules Simon.39 A glossy comb-over debited from his occipital hair was plastered over his bald spot. A very placid fellow, he never relaxed his smile, as if his dentition merited universal admiration. We took pleasure in seeing him pass through the courtyard, spick and span, with a felt hat pulled down over his ears, his cravat knotted Collin-style,40 clean gaiters on his feet, his hands behind his back, swinging a cane as if it were a pendulum.
Edgar Chablas made every effort not to be an imbecile, and always had, but the poor chap could not flatter himself one having performed very brilliantly in the enterprises of his life. He admitted to anyone and everyone that a strange fatality that condemned him to perennial half-measures and inevitable divisions. Philemon had not even contrived to be born individually; a twin brother, deceased thereafter, had doubled the importance of that initial event. Monsieur Chablas complained frankly of never having done anything worthwhile except with the assistance of a collaborator. He was perpetually astonished to find himself living at addresses that, as if by chance, bore a number supplemented by an A or a B. “To cap it all,” he said, “I married a widow. And you’ll no doubt find that I shan’t even be buried on my own.”—a baroque but rational assertion, to which Destiny did not wish to give the lie.
It is necessary to know, furthermore, that Monsieur Chablas played the part of only really being a sort of “supplementary human being” very well, for an alliance with a certain financier had increased his fortune copiously, and Madame Chablas, widow though she was of Monsieur Mourgue senior, augmented it with a love as fine as it was antiquated.
Madame Chablas—Baucis—was in no way outdone by her second husband in the matter of dress. She was one of those old ladies in frills who, by tightening their corsets, obtain in compensation a fearfully slim and rigid figure. She walked stiffly, holding herself erect, but her back was rounded in spite of her stoical efforts. Her hands, which long usage had stigmatized, were covered in rings all day. Her enormous coiffure, stuffed with hair-pieces, as yellow and dull as the hair of corpses, gave her an immeasurable head upon which, in order to go out, she perched imposing combinations of feathers ribbons, tulle and baubles. If you were downwind of her, a strong odor of chypre wafted over you, terrorizing our nostrils, even if the lady was still so far away that her face was only imperfectly revealed by the incredible cosmetic mask with which it was plastered. Those violent colors were more reminiscent of a painted puppet than a creature of flesh and blood. Should the mouth open, it pierced a curiously dark hole within the vermilion systems that represented the lips—and what further emphasized the effect of that remarkable physiognomy was that Madame Chablas continually widened her eyes in fright, by means of which the dear lady seemed to be perpetually in peril.
Monsieur and Madame Chablas! In talking about them, I rediscover the clownish image that they have left in my childhood memory. That age is pitiless. Today, when I remember that they had loved one another madly, that they loved one another still, and so strongly that one of them could not have survived without the other—when I tell myself that all that paltry artifice, and the employment of all those inoffensive coquetries were only intended desperately to prolong, for one another, a vestige of the charms that had once seduced them…
I can no longer reconcile the memory of those two marionettes with the sentiment of so rare an affection.
It was said that Monsieur Chablas was a millionaire and that the Ecole Jean-Jacques Rousseau owed its foundation to him. Nothing was more exact, according to what I subsequently ascertained. It was on the insistence of his beloved wife that Monsieur Chablas had gone into partnership with his stepson, the humble patrimony of the Mourgues having melted through the gambler’s fingers. I am certain, furthermore, that Madame Chablas only won that victory after a great deal of effort, for—as events have proved—Monsieur Chablas had no affection for Mourgue save for that channeled through the excellent person who bestirred herself between them. Was it not necessary to be a mother, in fact, to absolve a lunatic who squandered his exceptional gifts to the profit of the deadliest of penchants?
Is it the case, then, that Mourgue was disdainful of Science? I do not believe so. I saw him teach physics, chemistry and the natural sciences. He brought a passion and an extraordinary verve to his lessons. And besides, do we know the exact truth of this matter? Do we know that, in the privacy of his study, Mourgue only studied martingales?41 He has not left any scientific heritage, but what does that prove? Personally, I doubt it—because of the frog.
And I will explain now what the frog was.
The students of philosophy and the students of elementary mathematics came together in the same room for the course in natural sciences, and every year Mourgue repeated Galvani’s experiment—which consists of exciting the muscles of a dead frog with an electric current—for their benefit. Our headmaster presented the demonstration in a manner so novel and impressive, however, that the frog experiment became famous among the pupils of the Ecole Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Those who had seen it longed to see it again. They talked about it in advance, as a sort of periodic festival, and when the great day came, there was always an external audience at the windows of the privileged class, looking avidly in. One was taking advantage of a break, a second was skipping an oral examinations, a third had defected from the infirmary. The junior masters never punished anyone severely in that situation; Mourgue, indulgently, pretended not to see anything as he leaned over the table and produced the classical miracle.
To be perfectly accurate, there were three dead frogs there, already prepared. One of them was reduced to its inferior part, affixed by the legs to a cork mat. The second, pinned like the hindquarters of the first, and partially dissected, was connected, as usual, to the transmissions of a myograph.42 The third wore a little belt from which extended, at the level of the hips, a double conductive wire, twisted about itself, about a meter long.
As an excitatory source, Mourgue employed a bichromate jar-battery. Fixing two copper wires to the electrodes of the jar and gripping their free ends, he began by making the miserable hind legs dance the traditional jig, contracting and extending as the current passed through them.
Then came the myograph demonstration.
Finally, Mourgue took the third frog, and connected the flexible conductor—which, one deduced, penetrated the mysterious core of the batrachian’s flesh—to the battery. That was the moment we all awaited with anxious impatience.
As soon as the circuit was closed, one saw t
he frog’s four galvanized feet contract beneath it, and lift it up in a lifelike leap—and, convulsively but rhythmically, make the little cadaver move forward in a series of odiously natural hops.
Mourgue, battery in hand, followed the horrible creature, which he seemed to hold on a leash. It made its way to the end of the table, its eyes bleak and withered, an abominable laboratory automaton—and when Mourgue interrupted the current, the miserable thing suddenly collapsed, as if it were dying for a second time and Mourgue really were able to reanimate it, to kill it over and over again, endlessly…
Yes, I was thirteen years old when I saw that for the first time through the classroom windows. Next to me, a new junior master, Monsieur Bernardi, was ecstatic…but I couldn’t bear to look at such a scene any longer. I didn’t have the heart. I felt that I was about to fall ill, and I turned away, profoundly upset.
Monsieur Bernardi, perceiving my distress, made me sit down on a cement border. A few pupils gathered around me and Mourgue, who came out when the lesson finished, was informed of my fainting fit. “Come with me,” he said, paternally. “A little glass of Muscat wine, and that’ll be an end to it. Come to my room, my lad.”
I followed him.
With his mother and stepfather, Mourgue lived at the back of the courtyard, on the first floor of the central building, whose ground floor comprised the visiting-room and the refectory, while the second and third floors were occupied by our study-bedrooms. The most beautiful rooms in his apartment gave out through French windows on to a vast balcony, simple and truly academic, which ran along the entirely length of the façade. It was there that we often had occasion to see Madame Chablas. Busy with her domestic duties, she would use the balcony to go from one room to another when visitors were waiting in the reception-room for Mourgue to receive them. These appearances gave us pleasure, and we would watch Baucis emerge and vanish in her childish finery, as intriguing as one of those colored statuettes which emerge from the case of an old clock when a church clock chimes, gravely show themselves off, and then return to their place through another opening.
It was 10 a.m. The basement resounded with the noise of the kitchens. We went upstairs. Mourgue took me into the reception-room, and then turned right into the dining-room.
“Sit down,” he said—and he headed for a half-open door, with the manifest intention of closing it.
I knew very well that it was the door to Monsieur and Madame Chablas’s bedroom, adjacent to the dining-room. Mourgue seemed surprised to find the door ajar. He glanced into the room, and I saw him suddenly precipitate himself into it, pulling the door shut behind him.
I sat still for a few minutes, amazed and discomfited, trying to perceive, above the din of the break and the kitchens, some auditory clue as to what was happening behind the door. Soon, though, it reopened, just enough to allow Mourgue’s head through—a pale and nervous Mourgue who said to me, hoarsely: “Go away, my lad. An accident…you shouldn’t be here…”
I don’t know what he added with regard to medicine and the infirmary. I have wondered, since, whether he sent me to the infirmary in order to drink the medicine or simply to say that I had been sent there. I was no longer listening. I was utterly distraught and I fled precipitately.
In the courtyard boys were capering about and playing games. Monsieur Bernardi and another master, Monsieur Lafont, were strolling in the shade of the plane-trees, the former presumably conversing with the latter on the subject of the legal studies he was undertaking.
“Monsieur,” I stammered, “there’s been an accident in Monsieur Mourgue’s apartment, in Monsieur and Madame Chablas’s bedroom. I don’t know what…an accident!”
They looked by turns at my face and the headmaster’s windows. They consulted one another and, after a slight hesitation, ended up setting forth. I can’t explain why curiosity overcame my apprehension and how I came to accompany them, but I’ve explained the attraction that mystery exerted on my mind.
When we arrived at the entrance to the reception-room, Mourgue came through it, from the left. “My stepfather is dead!” he announced, with a tragic gesture. He continued on his way. We followed him, respectfully.
Monsieur Chablas was sitting, fully-dressed—as formally as ever—in a wing-chair. He was no longer smiling. The shadow of death was eating into his lividity.
“And my poor mother!” said Mourgue. “My poor mother! She’s mad with distress! I found her next to him, haggard and stupefied, not wanting to understand, refusing to believe…and when she did understand, she suddenly took refuge at the other end of the apartment. She’s locked herself in—oh, but I need to comfort her! She has to let me in!”
Then, giving every evidence of feverish anxiety, Mourgue left the room and went back the way he had come. We heard him, through the sequence of rooms, knocking on the door of his study and speaking in an urgent tone, replete with tenderness.
“Let me in, Mother! Don’t stay there all alone! Come on, be reasonable. Open the door!”
Madame Chablas seemed to make no reply. Mourgue came back, war-weary but less preoccupied. “She’s weeping,” he told us. “I heard her. I prefer that. I think it will calm her down, for the time being.”
The housekeeper came back from the market. She was bewildered. Mourgue dissuaded her from going to interrupt Madame Chablas’s despair.
Suddenly he noticed my presence. “Oh, Messieurs—that child, here!”
I didn’t wait for whatever would come next, but made myself scarce, full of confusion, with that weary reproach buzzing in my ears.
The bell rang.
The day continued according to the usual timetable, but in a silence maintained by the masters.
For my part, incapable of paying the slightest attention to the teachers, I couldn’t tear my thoughts away from that drama that had disturbed them so violently. The horror of death obsessed me. What a terrible fright, at 13! And in what a frightful light the Galvani experiment had been displayed to me! Must I admit it, in spite of myself? I was less shocked by the death of Monsieur Chablas than the galvanizations exhibited by Mourgue, and among the cadavers that I had observed since the morning, it was not that of the man the haunted me most obstinately.
I did not, however, abandon my relentless enquiries into what had happened in our headmaster’s apartment. I learned, in consequence, that the mortuary chamber had been prepared and that Madame Chablas still refused to come out of the study, where her son had rejoined her, by way of the balcony door.
Throughout that afternoon my gaze strayed repeatedly to the mute array of those French windows, veiled by their white curtains. The feeble light of two candles showed through the one furthest to the left. The furthest one to the right—that of the study—evoked for me the well-known disorder of that picturesque location, full of heaped-up papers and apparatus, where I now imagined the unfortunate Baucis sobbing on Mourgue’s shoulder and stubbornly insisting on remaining there, far from her Philemon, who was no longer a person.
As evening approached, I felt very tired. The timetable gave us a break of three-quarters of an hour before dinner. I took advantage of it to escape from communal life and went back to my room surreptitiously. Everything there rested in a peaceful inertia, bathed in warmth and shadow. I opened the Venetian blinds slightly, and the serene vision of the sun setting over the sea appeared to me through the slit. That was probably what had brought me to my high-set cell, avid as I was for the mysterious consolation that human beings extract from the reassuring splendors of Nature.
The sun was low enough to be seen declining with a promptitude that seemed to be accelerating. Its descent testified to a sort of voluptuous haste, as if the sea had beckoned it; and toward it, over the waves, sharing their moving extent, ran a fiery road, a glorious carpet—as if to invite it not to disappear, but rather to roll from the shore of the sky to the strand of the ocean.
I was drawn out of my ecstasy by confused noises, which reminded me that Mourgue’s study was situated direc
tly beneath my room. That brought me back to the funereal day. With my ear stuck to the wall, I listened fruitlessly for a few minutes—then I heard someone open the French window, and I leaned out.
Down below, the upper school pupils were arranged in two rows, facing me, ready to go into the refectory. They saw, as I did, Madame Chablas come out of the study. The poor woman seemed to be exhausted. Absorbed in her grief, she moved absent-mindedly, with a hesitant step. A powerful scent of chypre rose up, enveloping me.
So she had finally decided to fulfill her duties as a widow! Poor, poor Madame Chablas! I followed her with my eyes from behind my blinds. She stiffened herself as best she could, but nothing could have modified the somnambulistic gait pushing her toward the most redoubtable obligation of all! Nothing could ameliorate the emotion that the sight of that good woman, going where she was going, inspired in me. Nothing: not the burlesque make-up that still begrimed her, nor the jewels on her sagging hands, nor the accessories of her complicated dress, so blue and so green—all the things that had given rise to so many gibes!
I thought I could hear a sort of rustling sound beneath my window. My gaze left the walking woman, and I perceived what my comrades could not see from below—which is to say, a long flexible wire, which Madame Chablas was dragging behind her, the other end of which disappeared through the French windows of the study…
Before my stupefaction had even become manifest, however, I had witnessed the drama’s denouement. Madame Chablas, all of a sudden and without a moan, had collapsed.
Cries rang out.
Mourgue ran forward. I threw myself backwards. It was vital, above all, that he did not catch a glimpse of me. He must not! For me, at that moment, it was a matter of life and death. For at that moment, there was, for me, no doubt as to the truth!
My teeth chattered. Suppressed panic made me shiver.
I crept downstairs. I mingled with my comrades. Everyone was repeating that Madame Chablas, too, had just died. Mourgue had only picked up a corpse. Vanquished by fatigue, he had, it was said, fallen asleep by his mother’s side. She had gone out by herself without waking him, and he was now in despair at only having been brought to his feet by the clamor of the pupils.
The Doctored Man Page 22
