New Bodies for Old — Key Ideas to Explore

I shall be back in a quarter of an hour,” said he--and he went out without answering.

“Oh, if Cardaillac is going to take it up,” said one of the guests, “we shall have a merry time.”

However, when the lights were turned up, the faces seemed sterner than one would have expected. Mariotte was quite pale.

Cardaillac came back in a very short time--an astonishingly short time, one might have said. He sat down in front of the table facing his “Durand” machine, and darkness was once more established. Suddenly the table declared: “No need of others.... Put your feet on mine ... type.”

One heard the tapping of the fingers on the keys.

“It’s extraordinary!” exclaimed the typist-medium, “It’s extraordinary! My hands are writing of their own accord.”

“What bosh!” whispered Mariotte.

“I swear they are, I swear it,” said Cardaillac.

We remained a long time listening to the tapping of the keys which was every now and then broken by the ringing of the bell at the end of the line and the rasping of the carriage. Every five minutes a sheet was handed to us. We decided to retire to the drawing-room and to read them aloud as Gilbert, getting them from Cardaillac, handed them to us.

Page 79 was deciphered in the morning light and the machine stopped.

But what it had typed seemed to us exciting enough to make us beg Cardaillac to be good enough to give us the sequel.

He did so. And when he had passed many nights seated at the little table with his typing keyboard, we had the complete story of M. Vermont’s adventures.

The reader shall now be told them.

They are strange and scandalous; their future scribe is _bound_ not to think of printing them. _He will burn them_ as soon as they are finished; so that, had it not been for the complaisance of the little table, no one would ever have turned the leaves. That is why I, convinced of their authenticity, consider it _piquant_ to publish them beforehand.

For I hold them to be “veridical,”--as the elect call it--although they have some of the characteristics of wild caricature, and rather resemble an art-student’s funny sketch penciled by way of commentary on the margin of an engraving representing Science herself.

Are they possibly apocryphal? Well, fables are reputed to be more seductive than History, and Cardaillac’s will not seem inferior to many another one.

My hope, however, is that “Dr. Lerne” is the truthful account of real happenings, for in that case, since the little table uttered a prophecy, the tribulations of the hero have not yet begun, and they will be running their course at the very time that this book is divulging them--a very interesting circumstance indeed.

At any rate I shall certainly know in two years’ time if M. Nicolas Vermont lives in the little house in the Avenue Victor Hugo. Something assures me of it in advance--for how can one accept the idea of Cardaillac--a serious-minded and intelligent fellow--squandering so many hours in composing such a fable? That is my principal argument in favor of its truthfulness.

However, if any conscientious reader desires to find reasons for the faith that is in him, let him betake himself to Grey-l’Abbaye. There he will be informed about the existence of Professor Lerne and his habits. For my part I have not got the leisure for that, but I entreat any one who may undertake the search to let me know the truth, being myself very desirous of getting to the bottom of the question whether the following tale is a mystification of Cardaillac’s, or was really typed out by a clairvoyant table.

The first Sunday in June was drawing to a close. The shadow of the motor-car was fleeting on ahead of me and getting longer every moment.

Ever since the morning, people had been looking at me with anxious faces as I passed, just as one looks at a scene in a melodrama. With my leather helmet which gave me the look of a bald skull, my glasses like port-holes, or the eye-sockets of a skeleton, and my body clothed in tanned skin, I must have seemed to them some queer seal from the nether regions, or one of St. Anthony’s demons, fleeing from the sunlight towards the night, in order to enter therein.

And to tell the truth, I had almost a soul like that of one of the Lost; for such is the soul of a solitary traveler who has been for seven hours at a stretch on a racing-car. His spirit has something like a nightmare in it; in place of thought, an obsession is settled there. Mine was a little peremptory phrase--“_Come alone, and give notice_”--which, like a tenacious goblin, worried my lonely mind, overstrained as it was with joltings and speed.

And yet this strange injunction “_come alone and give notice_,” doubly underlined by my Uncle Lerne in his letter, had not at first struck me excessively. But now that I was obeying it--being alone and having given notice--and rolling along towards the Castle of Fonval, the inexplicable command insisted, so to speak, on displaying all its strangeness. My eyes began to see the fateful expression everywhere, and my ears made it sound in every noise in spite of my efforts to drive away the fixed idea. If I wanted to know the name of a village, the sign-post announced “Come alone”; “Give notice” followed in the wake of a bird’s flight, and the engine, unresting and exasperating, repeated thousands and thousands of times: “Come alone, come alone, come alone, give notice, give notice, give notice.” Then I began to ask myself the wherefore of this wish of my uncle, and not being able to find the reason, I ardently longed for the arrival which should solve the mystery, less curious in reality about the doubtless commonplace answer, than exasperated by so despotic a question.

Fortunately I was drawing near, and the country growing more and more familiar spoke so clearly of the old days, that the haunting question relaxed its insistence. The town of Nanthel, populous and busy, detained me, but on coming out of the suburbs I at last perceived, like a vague and very distant cloud, the heights of the Ardennes Mountains.

Evening draws on. Desiring to reach the goal before night I open out to the full. The car hums, and under it the road is engulfed in a whirl; it seems to enter the car to be rolled up in it, as the yards of ribbon roll themselves up on a reel. Speed makes its hurricane wind whistle in my ears; a swarm of mosquitoes riddle my face like small shot, and all sorts of little creatures patter on my goggles.

Now the sun is on my right; it is on the horizon; the acclivities and declivities of the road, raising me up and sinking me down very quickly, make the sun rise and set for me several times in succession. It disappears. I dash through the dusk as hard as my brave engine can go--and I fancy that the 234 XY has never been excelled. This makes the Ardennes about half an hour away. The cloudy offing is already putting on a green tinge, a forest color, and my heart has leapt within me. Fifteen years! I have not seen those dear great woods for fifteen years--they were my old holiday friends.

For it is there, it is in their shadow that the _château_ hides in the depths of an enormous hollow.... I remember that hollow very distinctly and I can already distinguish its whereabouts--a dark stain indicates it. Indeed it is the most extraordinary ravine. My late aunt, Lidivine Lerne, who was fond of legends, would have it that Satan, furious at some disappointment, had scooped it out with a single blow of his gigantic hoof. This origin is disputed. In any case the metaphor gives a vivid picture of the place, an amphitheater with precipitous walls of rock, with no other outlet than a large defile opening on the fields. The plain in other words penetrates into the mountain like a gulf of the sea; it there forms a blind-alley, the perpendicular walls of which rise as it spreads, and whose end is rounded off in a wide sweep. The result is that one gets to Fonval without the least climb, although it is right in the bosom of the mountain. The park is the inner part of the circle, and the cliff serves as a natural wall, except in the direction of the defile. This latter is separated from the domain by a wall into which a gateway has been let. A long avenue leads up to it, straight, and lined with lime trees. In a few minutes I shall be in it ... and soon after I shall know why nobody must follow me to Fonval--“come alone and give notice”--why these orders?

Patience. The mass of the Ardennes cleaves itself into clumps. At the rate I am going, each clump seems in motion; gliding rapidly; the crests pass one behind the other, draw near or draw off, seem lower and then rise again with the majesty of waves, and the spectacle is incessantly varying like that of a titanic sea.

A turn in the road unmasks a hamlet, I know it well. In the old days, every year, in the month of August, it was before that station that my uncle’s carriage, with Biribi in the shafts, awaited my mother and me. We used to go there for the holidays. All hail Grey-l’Abbaye! Fonval is only three kilometers distant now. I could go there blindfold. Here is the road leading straight to the place, the road which will soon plunge into the woods and take the name of Avenue.

It is almost night. A peasant shouts something at me--insults probably. I’m accustomed to that. My hooter replies with its threatening and mournful cry.

The forest! Ah, what a potent perfume it has for me--the perfume of the old-time holidays! Can their memory bring any other odor than that of the forest? It is an exquisite odor.... I should like to prolong this festival of scent.

Slowing down, the car goes on gently. Its sound becomes a murmur. Right and left the cliff walls of the wide gully begin to rise. Were there more light, I should be coming into sight of Fonval at the end of the straight line of the avenue. Hullo! What’s up?...

I had almost upset; the road had unexpectedly made a bend.

I slackened off still more. A little further on another bend--then another....

The stars one by one were beginning to shed their luminous dew. In the light of the Spring evening I could see above me the high mountain-crests, and the direction of their slopes astonished me. I tried to back, and discovered a bifurcation which I had not noted in passing. When I had taken the road to the right, it offered me after several windings a new branching-off--like a riddle; and then I guided myself in the Fonval direction according to the lie of the cliffs that ran towards the _château_, but new cross-roads embarrassed me. What had become of the straight avenue?... The thing utterly puzzled me.

I switched on the head-lights. For a long time by the aid of their light I wandered among the criss-crossing of the alleys without being able to find my way, so many various offshoots joined the open places, and so balking were the blind-alleys. It seemed to me I had already passed a certain birch-tree. Moreover the cliff walls always remained at the same height; so that I was really turning in a maze and making no advance. Had the peasant of Grey tried to warn me? It seemed probable.

None the less, trusting to chance, and piqued by the _contretemps_, I went on with my exploration. Three times the same crossing showed in the field of light of my lamps, and three times I came on that same birch-tree by different roads.

I wanted to call for help. Unfortunately the hooter went wrong, and I had no horn. As for my voice, the distance which separated me from Grey on the one side and Fonval on the other would have prevented its being heard.

Then a fear assailed me ... if my petrol gave out!... I halted in the middle of a cross-road and tested the level. My tank was almost empty. What would be the good in exhausting it in vain evolutions! After all, it seemed to me an easy thing to reach the _château_ on foot through the woods.... I tried it. But wire-fences hidden in the bushes blocked the way.

Assuredly this labyrinth was not a practical joke played at the entrance of a garden, but a defensive contrivance to protect the approaches of some retreat.

Much out of countenance, I began to reflect.

“Uncle Lerne, I don’t understand you at all,” thought I. “You received the notice of my arrival this morning, and here am I detained in the most abominable of landscape-gardens.... What fantastic idea made you contrive it? Have you changed more than I thought? You would hardly have dreamt of such fortifications fifteen years ago.”

... “Fifteen years ago, the night, no doubt, resembled this one. The heavens were alive with the same glitter, and already the toads were enlivening the silence with their clear short cries, so pure and sweet. A nightingale was warbling its trills as that one now is doing. Uncle, that evening of long ago was delicious too. And yet my aunt and my mother had just died, within eight days of one another, and the sisters having disappeared, we remained face to face, one a widower, and the other an orphan--you, uncle, and I.”

And the man of those far-off days stood before my mind’s eye as the town of Nanthel knew him then, the surgeon already celebrated at thirty-five for the skill of his hand and the success of his bold methods, and who in spite of his fame, remained faithful to his native town--Dr. Frédéric Lerne, Professor of Clinical Medicine at the “Ecole de Médecine,” corresponding member of numerous learned societies, decorated with many divers orders, and--to omit nothing--guardian of his nephew, Nicolas Vermont.

This new father whom the Law assigned me I had not met often, for he took no holidays and only passed his summer Sundays at Fonval. And even these he spent in work--ceaseless and secret work. On those days his passion for horticulture, suppressed all the week, kept him shut up in the little hothouse with his tulips and his orchids.

And yet, in spite of the rarity of our meetings, I knew him well and loved him dearly.

He was a sturdy man, calm and sober, rather cold perhaps, but so kind. In my irreverent way I called his shaven face an “old wife’s face,” and my jesting was quite misplaced, for sometimes he would turn it into an antique visage, lofty and grave, and sometimes into one of delicate mockery (“Regency” style). Among our modern shavelings my uncle was of the few whose head and face by their nobility prove their legitimate descent from an ancestor draped in a _toga_, and a grandfather clothed in satin, and would allow their scion to wear the costumes of his ancestors without putting them to shame.

For the moment Lerne appeared to me decked out in a black overcoat rather badly cut, in which I had seen him for the last time--when I was setting out for Spain. Being a rich man, and wishing me to be one too, my uncle had sent me into the cork business as an _employee_ of the firm Gomez & Co. of Badajoz.

And my exile had lasted fifteen years, during which the position of the Professor had certainly become better, to judge by the sensational operations he had performed, the fame of which had reached me in the depths of Estremadura.

As for me, my affairs had come to grief. At the end of fifteen years, despairing of ever selling safety-belts and cork on my own account, I had just returned to France to seek another trade, when Fate procured me that of an independent man. It was I who won the lucky number for a million francs, the donor of which wished to remain _incognito_.

In Paris I took comfortable rooms, but without luxury. My flat was convenient and unpretentious. I had the bare necessaries _plus_ a motor-car and _minus_ a family.

But before founding a new family, it seemed to me the right thing to renew relations with the old--that is to say with Lerne, and I wrote to him.

Not but what after our separation a regular correspondence had been established between us. At the beginning he had given me wise advice and had shown himself pleasantly paternal. His first letter indeed contained the announcement of a Will in my favor hidden in the secret drawer of a desk at Fonval.

After the rendering of his accounts as guardian our relations remained as before. Then, suddenly, his messages became different in character, and grew fewer and fewer, their tone becoming that of boredom, then of annoyance. The matter was commonplace, then vulgar, and the phrasing awkward; the very writing seemed to alter. Each time he wrote, these things became more marked, and I had to limit myself every 1st of January to sending my best wishes. My uncle replied with a few scribbled words.... Wounded in the only affection I possessed, I was much afflicted.

A year before this sudden change--five years before my return to Fonval and my wanderings in the labyrinth--I had read in the “Epoca”:

“We have received the news from Paris that Professor Lerne is saying good-by to his patients in order to devote himself to scientific research begun in the hospital of Nanthel. With this aim that excellent physician is retiring to the neighborhood of the town in the Ardennes, to his _château_ of Fonval which has been arranged for that purpose. He is taking with him among others, Dr. Klotz of Mannheim and the three assistants of the _Anatomisches Institut_ founded by this latter at 22, Friedrichstrasse, which has now closed its doors--when shall we have results?”

Lerne had confirmed this event to me in an enthusiastic letter, which, however, added nothing to the bald facts in the paragraph. And it was a year later on, I say again, that the change in his nature had taken place. Had twelve months of work ended in failure? Had some bitter disappointment so gravely affected the Professor that he should treat me like a stranger and almost as if I were a bore?...

In defiance of his hostility I wrote respectfully and with the utmost possible affection from Paris the letter in which I told him of my good fortune, and I asked his leave to pay him a visit.

Never was invitation less engaging than his. He asked me to give him warning of my arrival so that he might order a carriage to go and fetch me from the station. “You will doubtless not remain long at Fonval,” he added, “for Fonval is not a gay place. We are hard at work. _Come alone and give notice._”

But, Heavens! I _had_ given notice and I _was_ alone!--I who had considered my visit as a duty! Well, well, that was merely a piece of stupidity on my part.

And I gazed in bad humor at the star of light on the roads where the exhausted head-lamps were casting no brighter an illumination than a night-light.

Without doubt I was going to pass the night in that sylvan jail; nothing would get me out of it before day. The toads of the pool in the Fonval direction called me in vain; vainly the steeple clock of Grey rang out the hours to tell me of the other resting-place--for belfries are really sonorous lighthouses--I was a prisoner.