Martyrs of Science Page 4

  “To love, to unite oneself with another for life, in spite of misfortune and despair, he for her and she for him: that was what he understood by love; that was what she understood by love. Poor fools!

  “She belonged to another, and he knew of their love, and cruelly avenged himself for his misunderstood rights. She had only given her friend a tenderness that he alone could understand, that he alone could inspire; it did not matter; she belonged to another, body and soul; her thoughts, imagination, desires and dreams all belonged to another. That other claimed them. He claimed them by virtue of the pact she had signed, as a poor girl devoid of experience whose parents had guided her hand.

  “He proposed to the unfortunate—the man whose story I’m telling—either exile for him or opprobrium for her. Opprobrium for her! The world would have laughed at that fall as at the fall of an angel.

  “He exiled himself.

  “For five years, only two people in the world knew where he had taken refuge: a sure friend and her.

  “Finally, she became free again; the pact that bound her to another was broken, for death alone can break such a pact. And he received a letter that said: Come back; I can be yours.

  “Yours! What, together! Always together! No longer to be apart, no longer to await as a boon letters sent at long, uncertain intervals—letters, not from her but from another, saying: I’ve seen her; she loves you and is weeping...

  “Yours!

  “Together now, together forever, arms entwined, lips seeking one another out!

  “To admit his love to the entire universe; to say: I surround you, I protect you with my tenderness! She is mine! I am hers. She is my wife. She will be the mother of my children. Oh, what delight, children! To see them born, to be gripped by new bonds. Children who will love me as much as she loves me, whom I will love as much as I love her.

  “Come on, come on, faster! Here’s gold, press your horses, hurry up!

  “No distance was ever crossed with as much urgency as the two hundred leagues that separated him from her.

  “He arrives, he runs. ‘Where is she?’ He’s stopped; people try to speak to him. ‘Let me go! Let me go! Her! I want no one but her!’ He shoves them all away, moves them aside; he succeeds in reaching her. There she is!

  “She’s asleep. Next to her is the crucifix before which, yesterday, she prayed for him, for now she can pray for him; her love is chaste and virtuous.

  “He dare not wake her; her sleep is so pure, her beautiful face is relaxed with so much grace.

  “How pale she is! There are the traces of what she has suffered for him—for she has suffered a great deal, suffered as much as a woman can suffer; despair, anguish, opprobrium...and all that for love of him!

  “In his arms! In his arms! It’s necessary that he press her in his arms!

  “Her cool lips…her closed eyes…”

  “Dead!”

  “The unfortunate man!” cried Tréa, violently moved by the story.

  “Oh yes, very unfortunate,” said Sydney. “very unfortunate…for, after ten years of despair, after having thought his heart broken forever and incapable of love, the unfortunate fell in love again…with an angel like her. But that one, who could have made him forget all his sufferings, that one, who could have made a heart withered by despair palpitate with joy again...

  “Tréa, she loves another! Another will possess her!”

  With both hands, he covered his eyes.

  The young woman allowed her head to fall upon Sydney’s breast, and hid her face therein. And he gently picked up a hand that she abandoned to him, and covered it with kisses and tears.

  A few moments went by.

  “Tréa,” he murmured, then, emotionally. “Tréa, my Tréa…”

  Trembling, joyful, troubled, she raised her eyes tenderly toward him...

  An exclamation expired on her lips; her cheeks paled and tightened.

  Sydney’s mouth was wide open, open as no human mouth ever opens; convulsive efforts were reddening his face, his expression was strange and staring. He looked like a vampire ready to feed...

  Sydney ejected the young woman from his arms, and ran out.

  He came back almost immediately, a smile on his lips. Joy, he claimed, had caused him to experience a violent convulsion, but the fresh air had sufficed to cure it.

  Soon, and gradually, his grace and amiability dissipated the terrible impression that the bizarre incident had produced; he ended up causing it to be forgotten by means of gentle pleasantries, which he gradually transformed into tender words and passionate protestations.

  The following day, at dawn, Sydney went to Paul’s house as the latter was getting down from a carriage, had a long conversation with him, left him, and went to meet him again an hour later outside the town, armed with pistols and accompanied by two witnesses and two domestics.

  At the first shot, Sir Edward fell; a bullet had broken his left leg, the leg that was already wounded. He was seen to crumple at knee height, the heel forward.

  Paul fled, and the witnesses hastened around the colonel, but he wrapped himself up in his cloak, obstinately refused their help, and had himself taken away by his domestics in a carriage that was waiting a short distance away.

  A courier was sent to London during the night by the colonel, and as soon as he returned, the servants marveled to see their master quit his bed and go to see Tréa’s father, without limping any more than he had limped before the duel.

  A fortnight later, the marriage took place of Sir Edward Sydney, colonel and baronet, and Mademoiselle Tréa Vandermoudt.

  The newlyweds left immediately for London, to the great regret of the idlers and scandalmongers of Dunkerque, the sort of people who thrive in little towns and for whom gossip is the greatest joy—except, of course, for the pleasure of spreading a slander.

  For a year, Tréa has been Sir Edward’s wife.

  To bear his name, to be his, she has sacrificed everything, including her own conscience and the pledge made to another, and left everything, including her father and the beautiful land of France.

  She is unhappy! In buying that name at such a price, she believed that she was buying happiness; alas, she has only bought two things to which she had never given any thought: rank and fortune.

  Tender and sweet caresses, words of love murmured and repeated by lips so close to one another that they quiver with the warm vapor of their confused breath…never to be apart…two in one…that, oh, that was the happiness of which she had dreamed with him!

  Instead of that, a mysterious and inexplicable constraint! One would think that he is afraid of being broken by her hugs, devoured by her kisses!

  Spending nights alone, far from her, in an apartment that no one but he enters, had ever entered! Never, for him, a spouse who sleeps peacefully in his arms, murmuring words of love; never, for him, the awakening of a spouse whose dreams and sensuality have left her white shoulders bare and her breast palpitating!

  Always a desperate reserve, always stripping love of its sweetest prestige, its most intoxicating charms, repressing voluptuousness to the point of outrage!

  He has just left her; he has just retired to that apartment whose mysteries he alone knows, that apartment that Tréa cannot open either with supplications or tears.

  What are the mysteries that unfold there?

  Already too much that is strange and menacing surrounds her: that fixed and satanic gaze…that horrible convulsion, that gaping vampiric mouth, which she saw one evening…that mortal wound miraculously cured...

  Why that hidden life? Without being superstitious, Tréa cannot help believing that there is something supernatural about it.

  But let what comes of it come! There is too much despair, too much doubt, too much anguish. She is his wife; she has the right to penetrate where the sacred title that she holds on the part of Heaven and the law is perhaps being outraged...

  She gets up, she takes a step…and then, frightened of what she wants to do, she stops
...

  At length, she arms herself with all the resolution of which she is capable, and marches with slow and unsteady steps to the door of the mysterious apartment.

  There, she hesitates again.

  She leans over, she listens: not a word, not a movement, not a sound!

  She is about to draw away when the moon, suddenly emerging from behind a cloud, causes a key to gleam. A key! He has forgotten to take it out.

  She can go in.

  Hesitation and anguished twitches take possession of her again.

  Finally, she turns the key; she pushes the door slowly; she goes in.

  A profound darkness…no other sound than the breath of her mouth, and the palpitations of her heart.

  If she dared to lift the thick curtain over the window! She reaches out her hand; the fabric yields, falls, and the moonlight inundates the fantastic apartment.

  Then a slobbering voice threatens; then a bald and naked head looms up, a bald head, one of whose eyes is nothing but an empty hole; a bald head, whose flaccid cheeks dangle to either side of a jawless mouth; a bald head, the rightful complement of a mutilated trunk to which only one arm and one leg remain...

  Now, she is mad.

  THE PAINTER GHIGI

  I have never understood very clearly,

  in a satisfactory fashion, how some

  people can cut a man’s throat as if he

  were a pig, and pay no heed to their

  crime after committing it, while

  others suffer horrible remorse.

  I have referred in vain to differences

  in nervous organization, to differences

  in education; it has remained evident to

  me nevertheless that remorse, like disease,

  destroys some people while leaving others

  untouched.

  D.-M. Fabien, De l’Organisation morale de l’Homme, ch. VII.

  Happy is he who feels no remorse! If he throws himself on his bed, he soon abandons himself to a refreshing and peaceful sleep; he does not pant in the grip of a nightmare; he does not wake up with a start; he does not dart wild glances in all directions.

  He does not yearn for daybreak as a blessing; and during the day, he does not have one implacable idea, and one alone, a frightful phantom that attaches an insupportable gaze to him, which never lowers the accusing finger extended toward him.

  He does not reply in a brusque tone to the loving words of his young wife; he does not push away his child, who comes to kiss him; he is not irritated by his noisy games.

  He has no remorse!

  People envy me my renown and my glory: it is a crown of red hot iron that burns my head, and which I cannot tear off.

  People envy me my palazzo, my villa, my domains, my carriage, my horses: I would give them all, I would give everything, to whomever could take away my remorse.

  But that is impossible, alas. No, that is quite impossible, for I have done everything to rid myself of my remorse.

  I have never been able to do it!

  I have knelt in a priest’s confessional; I uttered such sobs there; I struck my breast there with such despair that the man of God said: “My son, there is no sin that cannot be redeemed by such great repentance.”

  I spoke; the priest fled.

  After that, young artists sometimes demanded why I was pale, why my lips never wore a smile any longer. “Come with us; a secret pain is eating you away, but there is no pain that joyful orgies cannot cure; come to lewd songs repeated in chorus; come to wine that will intoxicate, to semi-naked women who will intoxicate even more; there—that is what you need!”

  I followed them, and when their speech became noisier; when, tottering, they were rolling on the grass in the arms of their mistresses, I drank, I drank, and I drank more, for I said to myself: What joy! I shall be like them! I shall no longer have reason!

  Alas, wine has no drunkenness for me.

  Once, I saw a hermit who lived far away from men; he boasted to me of the calm he had found in his retreat, and I ran away into a desert.

  I prayed, in vain; I imposed the greatest austerities upon myself, in vain; I tore myself with blows of the disciplinary lash, in vain: there, always there, my execrable idea!

  I was told that women have marvelous secrets to render peace to those who have lost it; that no one in the world knows how they are able to put dolor and despair to sleep; I was told that, cradled in their arms, with one’s head laid on their bosom, one becomes placid again, devoid of remorse; that they purify and enable forgetfulness.

  I married Marianna, an angel of beauty, tenderness and love, the most celestial of creatures who ever murmured intoxicating words in a man’s ear.

  Her caresses make me feel sick; they are killing me; I have no response to make but gestures of refusal, indifferent, harsh words.

  She calls me Ghigi.

  Ghigi, Ghigi! Always and everywhere that execrable name!

  Romans, foreigners, my wife, my son, always Ghigi, always Ghigi!

  If they knew how much it hurts me, what dagger they’re showing me, what muffled death-rattle they’re causing me to hear!

  For I’m not Ghigi. Antonio Ferragio is my name. Ghigi is a name I’ve stolen, a name in which there’s ingratitude, treason, adultery, theft and murder!

  Oh, if there were no Hell, if death were oblivion, how immediately I would die!

  But a life without end, a life of eternal punishment, a life in which I always hear that name: Ghigi! Ghigi!

  Never can my head, never can my soul conceive an idea with which that name is not alloyed; it has become inherent in my nature; it torments me; for me, it is a necessity. And now that I’m alone here again, alone in the midst of darkness and silence, tell me how it is that I find, in writing ideas that drive one to despair, a horrible pleasure, a torment that Hell does not have; tell me how an imperious force is attaching me to this table, is making this pen move.

  Oh, may you never experience remorse!

  There was once a time when I never experienced remorse myself. I was a young man then, with a slim figure and black curly hair, a young man who abandoned himself with delight to a precarious and nonchalant life. Pleasure was my great, my only affair: I enjoyed the present moment, and never had a care for the quarter-hour that would follow it, much less for the next day.

  One night, one single night, arrived, however, to change my destiny, and make me the most rascally and miserable of men.

  I had spent a part of that fatal night in debauchery; my head heated by wine, I was wandering aimlessly in the ruins of Palermo with a friend when we encountered a senora escorted by two cavaliers. “I’ll wager,” I cried, that I can lift the veil of that unknown beauty!”

  “I’ll help you,” replied the madman who was accompanying me.

  That cost the lives of two men—one of the cavaliers and my friend were killed.

  In the meantime, I lifted the senora’s veil; it was the governor’s mother.

  “Antonio Ferragio,” she said to me, your head will expiate my brother’s death.”

  Where could I find refuge? Already, sbirri were running in response to the senora’s screams, those implacable screams that never ceased naming Antonio Ferragio.

  I fled aimlessly, and when day broke, I was alone a few leagues from Palermo, on the shore of the sea.

  I let myself fall on to the sand, in a stupid torpor produced by fatigue and despair. I resolved to wait there for the fate that I could not escape. For I could not deny my murder; one of the victims had recognized me. I could not leave the country; I did not have a sequin. I could not find a refuge; anyone who had given me shelter would have perished with me.

  A man, still young, passed by on horseback. Seeing me pale and unmoving, he thought that I had been robbed and stabbed by thieves, and came to help me. His questions and his pity wearied me. “Leave me alone,” I said. “I’ve murdered the governor’s uncle.”

  “Climb up on the rump of the horse with me,” He said. “I�
�ll give you a safe hiding-place where I defy the governor to find you.”

  My death was inevitable, death on the scaffold! Imagine what I experienced in hearing those words, which gave me hope! I leapt on to the horse, and after riding for three hours, we arrived at a villa of meager appearance.

  The interior of the villa matched its exterior: poor walls with no wallpaper—but they were partly covered by paintings worthy of a celebrated master.

  Then the stranger said to me: I have your secret, and to reassure you as to my fidelity, I’ll give you mine. You’ve heard mention of the Neapolitan painter Ghigi, whom some say has been dead or ten years and others say has gone to Mexico. I’m Ghigi.

  “After having studied my art for a long time in foreign lands, I returned to Naples, where no one recognized me, for I was an orphan, and fifteen years of absence and traveling have changed me considerably. I was nevertheless about to take up residence in Naples and devote myself to works of art, when I saw the young daughter of Count Rienzi, when I succeeded in becoming Paola’s lover.

  “Then all my plans changed; I liquidated my fortune, abducted Paola and, fleeing the vengeance of a noble family, we came to seek refuge in Palermo under assumed names. I bought this villa, where I live a happier existence with Paola than I can say.

  “Yes, the mystery that surrounds us, never being apart from one another, living only for one another, cultivating the art that I adore—unknown, it’s true, but also without being harassed by envy—all extends over our existence a peaceful, inexpressible charm. I’ve exchanged glory for happiness, and the deceptive amity of men for Paola’s love; not a day goes by when I do not bless Heaven!

  “I’ve revealed to you what no one in the world knows, other than myself and Paola; you can see now that your refuge is safe.”