The Givreuse Enigma

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

“I mean some substitution, so improbable that one is tempted to judge it impossible, but which must nevertheless be taken into account.”

  They were walking on the outer wall, under a yellow crescent moon that was setting in the placid waves. Their white beards reflected silvery gleams. They were surrounded by the kind of puzzlement that the anthropoids of the Tertiary Era had not yet felt, but which was already tormenting the people who had raised the heavy granite amid the bracken.

  “What do you believe?” asked the Givreuses’ doctor, timidly.

  “Nothing yet. All judgment is suspended—but how many scientific facts are more secure than the unity of these two men?”

  The other shuddered, and darted a sideways glance at Savarre. “Unity? So you think they’re both Pierre de Givreuse?”

  “I think that I’ve no reason to doubt it. There’s no better-established proof in the archives of identity than the proof of that unity, notwithstanding the character of the event. I don’t say, mind, that the two men are only one man, or that their duality seems less complete than any other human duality, but I do say that everything leads me to admit that they have been formed out of only one man.”

  “Come on!” exclaimed Morlay, whose common sense was in revolt. “You don’t mean to suggest that each of them is a part of Pierre?”

  “I mean the opposite. I’ve gone through all the imaginable combinations—imaginable for me; unless we go back to substitution, I can see nothing but a doubling.”

  “But that’s impossible.”

  “It’s merely contrary to all human experience. No one has ever seen a man, a lion, a frog, a fish or a crab become, by binary division, two men, two lions, two frogs, two fish or two crabs—but that doesn’t alter the fact that binary division is the primitive mode of generation, and that, for a period that was perhaps the longest in the history of living things, it was by splitting into two that creatures reproduced. And let’s not forget, my dear friend, that our bodies contain a multitude of cells that operate in that manner…”

  “Then you think that Pierre de Givreuse…” Morlay stopped himself, so crazy did the hypothesis appear.

  “I don’t think anything yet, my friend; I limit myself to offering one of the two conclusions imposed by my fallible logic. That conclusion, already quite grotesque in itself, becomes even more so if one seeks to make it more precise. It is in fact, necessary to suppose, not only that each of Pierre de Givreuse’s cells has divided into two cells, but also that the entire mineral and quasi-mineral part of the body has divided in an analogous manner—that every hair for example, has become two hairs, and that the bony elements have split in two, particle for particle. It’s obviously a monstrous absurdity—but absurdity can’t always stop us; the history of science shows us that at every step…”

  He fell silent. The yellow crescent moon had become red and was about to plunge into the waves. Owls raised their necromantic voices.

  “What if it were a miracle, though?”

  “It would be a miracle! But what does that word mean? It presumes that we believe natural laws to be absolute—and that another absolute is required to break them. I’ve only ever thought of laws as approximate, susceptible to exception or even to disappearance. What we know about the world is utterly negligible; I’ve long been wary of building a general theory on so microscopic a basis. I see petty theories as provisional; I’m not their servant…they’re the ones that serve me. By what do you expect me to be astonished?”

  “And if it were never to be explained?”

  “It would be one more little fact to add to the infinity of inexplicable facts. In any case, everything is inexplicable, at bottom. Human explanation only contrives to bring what is unfamiliar to us into the ranks of the familiar—but familiar things are no better understood than the rest!”

  II.

  It was a mild and pleasant winter’s day, when large clouds were pursuing one another over never-ending waves. Fishing-boats were sailing in the distance, clearly visible, even though they were sometimes surrounded by mist. Two frigates with trenchant sails were floating amid the islands and a huge seagull was soaring in the gentle majesty of the moment, while the sea, lifted up by an ample and fresh breeze, seemed to be in the morning of its birth in eternal time.

  The two soldiers had accompanied Valentine to the beach. The cliffs rose up like chaotic citadels, hollowed out by caverns, the highest of which still sheltered men of the Middle Ages.

  The strollers walked silently for some time. There was a plenitude of life in their breasts. Around them, Nature was—as always—a friend and an enemy. They drew out her strength with every breath, but she also surrounded them with her perpetual threat and her inexhaustible destruction. The love that exalted them was an emanation of her; like her it filled them constantly with joyful energy, and like her, it never ceased to breathe anxiety into them.

  The beautiful girl whose skirts flapped in the wind, her pale face more nuanced than the clouds, and the scarlet fruit of her mouth, sang them a hymn more passionate than the equinoctial wind.

  They were full of strength now, although their gait had a slight limp in consequence of their wounds. The great emotions of war rendered their affection more serious. They wanted to be reborn in other individuals; the blood of their race was in revolt against sterility. A fatal destiny intended them to be rivals.

  They were dreaming as they followed the slender silhouette over the sand and pebbles; they were suffering, but not from jealousy. No jealousy could emerge in them. As on the day when they had seen one another for the first time, they had an inclination toward one another that came from the wellspring of existence, which nothing could ever break. Was it possible that one of the two sufferers would sacrifice himself?

  In her innocence, Valentine thought that she was in love with the one who had taken the name of Pierre de Givreuse—but far from being better able to distinguish him from the other with each passing day, she was less able to distinguish him. It seemed to her that they were even more identical than before, and she was not mistaken.

  To begin with, a difference in the texture of their skin had been perceptible, and—to a very subtle gaze—a slight difference in the breadth of their faces. Augustin de Rougeterre had characterized it one day by saying: “One is slightly more vertical, the other slightly more horizontal.” That difference had disappeared. The texture of their skin was identical; the two faces were no longer distinguishable from one another by any indication, however slight. There was no longer any other indication but the difference in their costumes.

  Often, without the knowledge of Madame de Givreuse and Mademoiselle de Varsennes, they exchanged clothes, and then the one who had taken on the role of Philippe became Pierre. These changes answered a sentimental need; they permitted each of them to live, by turns, in the most filial intimacy with their mother.

  The beach was deserted. They had, however, encountered a shrimp-fisher and then two adolescents. Their resemblance excited scarcely any astonishment; it had become familiar. Everyone knew the story that Rougeterre had told Madame de Givreuse. The story scarcely even seemed strange now; Nature and mirrors have accustomed the human imagination, over thousands of years, to the most marvelous resemblances.

  One of the two found himself alone with Valentine; it was the one who was playing Pierre de Givreuse that day. A weak lukewarm breeze had sprung up, coming from the sea, bringing the effluvia of the ocean with a slight hint of a storm. The young woman became nervous.

  Because her life had been so perfectly purified by education and a natural docility to regulation, Valentine suffered the instincts that are in all of us, without any enlightenment to clarify them. Her reading, selected with care, had left her in an ignorance that she never tried to break. With regard to everything implicated in the essentials of feminine destiny, she was like a little child, even though, on the other hand, her nature was made for a great amour. What had been born within her agitated her magnificently, like a storm in the darknes
s. She only knew that she had to partake of the destiny of a man, and she consented to that—but she trembled before a formidable reality: there were two images of the same man. This drama, which she was incapable of working out, troubled her days and her nights.

  They reached a fantastic landscape of oddly-shaped stones displayed at the foot of the cliffs in a “mute tumult;” they were reminiscent of cyclopean constructions, primitive cities, granite cemeteries, pointed towers, pyramids and the ruins of cathedrals. Only the sea had labored there, however, for hundreds of thousands of years, with the collaboration of storms and tempests.

  Valentine studied the mounting waves. They launched themselves upon the stones with those extended roars that astonished the ancient poets; they were like immense herds of fabulous beasts with white fur and green skin; they surged into granite straits and re-emerged broken. From the open sea, further herds came running, incessantly, which seemed bound to scale the cliffs and drown the land—but the force that heaped them up from the depths was the same that marked their bounds and chased them away.

  “Do you remember?” the soldier murmured, timidly. “It was here that we took our last walk…before the war. How many times I’ve evoked the memory of you, standing on a red rock, with your hair almost in disarray. A ship as slender as a crescent moon was passing in the west…dusk was falling…the fires of a lighthouse and a star intersected on the surface of the sea. It’s the most important memory of my life…”

  She turned her beautiful Celtic eyes toward him; the mute avowal spoke louder than words; they quivered with youth, ardor and dreams…but when the other drew nearer, Valentine was gripped by an intolerable anguish. She was certain that he also loved her, and that there was no essential reason why he should be rejected, but there was horror, pity and remorse within her. Everything that she might have said died away before an instinct as imperious as it was indefinable.

  When they had returned to the château, the two soldiers lingered in the overgrown garden. The one who had spoken to Valentine described the scene as if he were repeating it to himself.

  “What do we do now?” said the other. “You’ve determined the future. One of us will marry Valentine. That’s necessary. It will lead to a sane and robust happiness. But what will become of the other? Might he suffer?”

  “Another love might save him. Life is many-faceted. It only requires one meeting. Time is on our side…and its metamorphoses.”

  A raucous flock of rooks rose up from the ruins. The two men remained silent, caught in a tragic uncertainty.

  “Which of us, henceforth, will bear our name into old age, and will have Valentine as his lot?”

  “Which of us will no longer bear the name…like a foundling child…and might perhaps have no love as his lot?”

  The future filled with darkness; they saw the horror of their detached fates; a long lamentation reverberated in their being.

  The one who had spoken to Valentine said, in a dull voice: “The resolution is too demanding. We can’t take it yet. Life would be equally intolerable for both of us. What are a few months—or even a year—to Valentine?”

  The rooks croaked more loudly; an owl raised its mournful voice. The two Givreuses lowered their heads, lost in dolorous meditation. Each of them felt that it was impossible for him to consent to the other’s self-sacrifice.

  III.

  Savarre continued his enquiry. He made a journey to Gavres and Viorne. At Gavres, the hospital staff had been almost entirely replaced; he only found Major Formental there. The latter had retained a clear memory of the event but had gradually come to attach less importance to it. Savarre perceived that. Guided by a jealous sentiment, even more than his interest in the Givreuses, he attempted to minimize the fantastic aspects of the adventure, attributing it to pathological phenomena.

  Formental, who admired Savarre blindly, allowed himself to be swayed by his illustrious colleague and recounted what he knew without asking anything in return. The interview communicated no new facts to the neurologist, but he had expected none; he had only come to Gavres to verify the testimony.

  At Viorne, he found none of the original witnesses. He had to travel for five days before encountering Major Herbelle and the male nurse Alexandre. There again, as he had foreseen, he found only confirmations. He let Herbelle believe, like Formental, that the “Givreuse case” was the issue of nervous pathology, and that it was, in the final analysis, a matter of a double illusion, provoked by fatigue and the wounds suffered by two men who the hazard of birth had made almost identical and whom singular circumstances had brought together.

  Like Formental, Herbelle raised a few objections—but like Formental, he had gradually lost interest in the event and was inclined to believe it less extraordinary than he had initially imagined. He did not insist, and acquiesced when Savarre said, as he left: “A few obscure points remain, but I’m almost sure that they can be explained…”

  Savarre explored the battlefield. He saw nothing exceptional, save for the Château de Grantaigle. The local inhabitants he questioned told harrowing stories; he listened to them patiently, but discovered nothing therein that related to his enquiry.

  In order to leave no stone unturned, he went to visit an old bone-setter who was reputed to have achieved miraculous cures. The old man lived in the middle of the heath, in a hovel that the shells had spared. He looked like a sorcerer, quite diabolical, with blue-green eyes as dilatable as an owl’s, a long face with a goat-like beard and thick hair in serpentine hanks that stuck out wildly in all directions. Savarre’s visit alarmed him; he played the idiot. Encouraged by a 20-franc note, however, he decided to impart a few confidences; they were naïve, amusing and quaint. He had recipes, no worse than others, and had at length acquired a certain primitive science—but he could not be of any use to Savarre.

  The neurologist explored Grantaigle. An old gardener, deaf and senile, was the sole resident. The neurologist learned that the château’s owner had disappeared and that the servants had been killed or had fled. He made a futile visit to the ruins.

  The local people gave him a few details regarding the château’s owner, Antoine de Grantaigle. He was about 55 years old and had once enjoyed a measure of celebrity; he had three or four discoveries in physical chemistry to his credit. For a quarter of a century he had had no further communication with the Academy of Sciences and had published nothing in the journals, but he had not given up. On the contrary, he had worked obstinately in a large laboratory installed in the château; it was vaguely known that his experiments had as much relevance to biology as to the physicochemical sciences.

  Two nephews had come to the château after the victory of the Marne, and had recently reappeared. At first, it had been believed that Antoine de Grantaigle had simply retreated before the invasion, but now there was hesitation between three hypotheses: he was buried under the debris; he had been put to death by the enemy in some corner of the heath or in the forest; or he had been deported to Germany. The nephews had ordered searches which, thus far, had produced no result.

  Savarre went to see one of the nephews, who was engaged in the auxiliary services. He was a man of sallow complexion who occupied his leisure in peace-time writing a History of the Origins of Chivalry and Considerations on the Evolution of Heraldic Science. He had heard mention of Savarre; without being familiar with the doctor’s work, he took him for a great man.

  The interview took place in a deserted railway station where wagons were awaiting a locomotive. Grantaigle’s nephew was satisfied by the vague pretexts that Savarre invoked, and gave him a few details regarding the scientist. “An impenetrable man! We hardly knew him. I believe that he was much occupied with radiations, and the origins of terrestrial life—but no one was allowed in his laboratory except for a young Champenois as secretive as he was, who was mobilized and who perished in the Hauts-de-Meuse. Are you familiar with my uncle’s first discoveries?”

  “They were remarkable and highly original.”

 
“So they say. I’m not competent to judge. What’s certain is that he’d lost none of his intelligence and that his endurance in his work seemed unusual. There’s reason to believe, therefore, that he had made other discoveries; my impression is that they might have surpassed the first and formed a sort of whole. If he didn’t think it worthwhile publishing them he must have had good reasons—he might have been an original thinker, but he wasn’t a maniac, or even an eccentric.”

  “Do you think he’s still alive?”

  “No. If he’d been deported to Germany he’d have found a means of notifying us of his fate. He was very clever when he deemed it necessary, and prodigiously skillful. He’d have played his guards like little children and stuffed them with illusions—and the truth is that they wouldn’t have been capable of keeping him prisoner even for a few days.”

  Grantaigle’s nephew left Savarre briefly in order to receive a dispatch. “Ah, Monsieur,” he sighed, when he returned to the scientist, “what a plague these dispatches, letters and circulars are…the army has to be strong in order not to be contaminated. Is there anything else you want to know?”

  “What became of the laboratory?”

  “Destroyed—reduced to dust, evaporated into atoms. Nothing remains of it except for a fragment of a pyrometer—which is of no interest—and a piece of burnt paper on which I was able to make out one sentence: Life came to us from the interstellar realm, and only the interstellar realm can explain it to us…”

  “Ah!” Savarre murmured, pensively. He paused momentarily, then said: “If anything is discovered, would you have any objection letting me know?”

  “None. On the contrary—unless it concerns personal secrets…of a sentimental nature, I mean, for the scientific secret is lost if my poor uncle has been killed.”

  Savarre withdrew, vaguely disappointed. It seemed fundamentally ridiculous to him to establish any connection whatsoever between Grantaigle’s work and the enigma of the Givreuses. It’s more likely, he thought, as the train carried him westwards, that the adventure is of a superhuman order than a scientific one.