Maurice Renard

“ It was then, when the world was applauding my triumph, and just as the very moment when love, having come on the scene, was urging me to make money, in order that Emma should live a life of luxury—it was just then that I conceived my great idea, which proceeded from this reasoning:
“If a millionaire, dissatisfied with his physique, pays five thousand dollars for the pleasure of embellishing it a little, what would he not give for changing it altogether, and acquire a new body for his ego, for his brain—a covering full of grace, vigor and youth, in place of an old sickly and repulsive casing! ”

“ And yet, as the spirit departed from it into the Unknown, the dead body of my uncle seemed to me to grow more beautiful. The soul is so praised in comparison with the flesh, that one is [266] astonished at seeing the latter become beautiful at the departure of the former. I followed the progress of the phenomenon on Lerne’s features. The Great Mystery shed the light of a divine serenity over his brow, as if life were a cloud whose passing reveals some strange sun; and thus whilst the countenance took on the hue of white marble, the puppet became a statue. ”

“ This metallic car, from which wood, india rubber and leather had been banished—of which no fragment belong to matter at one time alive, was it not an organized body which had never lived? This automatic mechanism—was it not a body capable of reflexes, but a body devoid of intelligence? Was it not in fact—according to the note-book—a possible receptacle of a soul in its totality,—that receptacle which the Professor in his haste had declared to be non-existent? ”

“ The curtain was no longer drawn.
Lerne and his assistants, grouped round the operating table, were busy about something which their grouping hid from me—probably the cleaning of instruments.
Through the wide-opened door, one could see the park, and hardly twenty yards away, a corner of the paddock, where the cows were ruminating and lowing.
Only, I might have imagined myself transported into the most revolutionary picture of the impressionist school. The azure of the sky, without losing its limpid depths, had changed into a fine orange dye. ”

“ Just as my eyes, my ears and my muzzle sent to my brain visions, sounds, and smells hitherto unimagined, my tongue with its strange papillæ was bound to afford me very original sensations of taste.
Simple herbs gave a savor of which human palates have no idea. The cuisine of the epicure cannot possibly give them as much pleasure with twelve courses, as a bull gets in a small meadow. ”

“ A little crackling sound made itself heard in the bower right over our heads.
Lerne jumped convulsively and raised his head.
It was merely a squirrel watching us from the top of a branch.
My uncle darted a ferocious glance at it, fixing it as if he were taking aim at it; then he began to laugh in a reassured sort of way.
“Ha, ha, ha! it’s only a little ... thing,” said he, unable to find the word.
“Really,” thought I within myself, “how queer one may become as one gets old. ”

“ Emma no longer came downstairs; from the little drawing room I heard her busy with her futile amusements in the lay-figure room. Her little sharp heels went tap, tap, tap on the floor above. My nights were sleepless. The harassing idea of Lerne and Emma together kept me awake.
I tried to go out once, to take a walk in the cool of the night, and so weary out my body. All the doors down below were locked.
Ah! Lerne was keeping a good watch on me.
However, the imprudence I had committed in revealing my discovery of Macbeth had no other apparent result than a renewal of his friendship. ”

“ To begin with, my nephew, I was wrong a moment ago, in calling you ‘Jupiter.’ To use words in an exact way, I have not metamorphosed you into a bull, and you are still Nicolas Vermont, for the name denotes, above all, the personality which is the soul and not the body.
“As, on the one hand, you have kept your soul, and as, on the other, the soul has its seat in the brain, it is easy for you to argue by induction, in the presence of those surgical instruments, that I have just exchanged Jupiter’s brain with yours and that it now lives in your cast-off body. ”

“ Emma could not keep still. We fixed that very evening for our departure in the car, intending to sleep at Nanthel, in order to be in Paris the next day.
And the hour came for departing from Fonval for ever. I went over the château, which was empty of furniture, and the park, in which there was no leafage. It looked as if the autumn had stripped them both.
The old perfumes still clung to the abandoned rooms, recalling sad memories. Ah! what charm there sometimes is in musty things! ”

“ I saw Nell immediately. They had given her a kennel apart from the others. Her great starved, hairless, wretched body was lying against the grating.
I called out, “Donovan, Donovan!” She did not budge.
The eyes of the dogs gleamed in the depths of their somber huts, and some of them growled.
“Donovan! Nell!” I had an intuition of the truth. There also the scythe of Death had done its work. Yes, Nell also was cold and stiff. A chain twisted round her neck seemed to have strangled her. I was going to make sure of this, when Lerne and Johann showed themselves at the entrance of the courtyard. ”

“ Klotz the murderer of Lerne, and not Lerne the assassin of Klotz! I could not get over it.
That is a confidence which the double person had forgotten to make to me, and vexed at having been his dupe so long, I said to myself, that, had I been living alone with him, I should probably have discovered his imposture, but that the society of people as easily deceived as Emma was, or accomplices like the assistants, whether duped themselves or trying to dupe me, had dragged me into this delusion.
Ah! Aunt Lidivine, thought I, you were right to smile with your lips of chalk. ”

“ The town of Nanthel, [18] 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. ”

“ I thought the experiment would succeed on a corpse because there was no fluid to encumber the receptacle to be filled. I had not reflected that death is not compatible with a soul—that inseparable companion of life itself. ”

“ But the prettiest of all those hybrids was perhaps a rose tree with ox-eyes for flowers and crab-apples for fruit.
In the center of the rotunda a bush showed a mingling of leaves so dissimilar as those of the holly, the lime and the poplar. Having pressed them apart I satisfied myself that they issued all three from a single stem.
[71] It was the triumph of grafting—a science that Lerne had for fifteen years been pushing to the verge of the miraculous, so far indeed that the results presented a somewhat disquieting spectacle. “When man sets his hand to Life, he makes monsters.” ”

“ In our days, by means of its organs which have become automatic, the mechanism controls the mechanism. A chauffeur is no more than a pilot; once going, his machine keeps up its own energy; once awake, it will only fall asleep again at the word of command. In short, as Lerne bade me note, the modern motor-car enjoys properties that a spinal cord might confer; it enjoys instinct and reflex actions. Spontaneous movements take place in it along with the voluntary movements caused by the intelligence of the driver, who becomes as it were the brain of the vehicle. ”

“ The drains were to be the tomb of Klotz.
He’s dead! He’s dead! I’m rid of him. He is dead, and he can never come to life again. In fact, he is dead! His spirit is with the deceased. He can never hurt me again. Ah, ha! DEAD! The filthy brute!
[305] I ought to be happy, but I am not very. Oh, it is not because of Emma. No doubt the “baggage” causes me pain, but that will soon be cured, and to admit that grief is consolable, is already to be consoled from it. My great trouble comes from my recollections. What I have seen and felt harasses me.
The madman Nell! The operation! The Minotaur! ”

“ Still under the excitement of an imbecile happiness, which increased my strength and agility tenfold, I climbed the trellis, hand over fist, and jumped down on the other side of the wall.
I found my car in its garage of greenery. I piled in my parcels as fast as I could. I was ridiculously happy. Emma should be mine, and what a mistress she would make!—a woman who had not recoiled before the duty of bringing to a friend, now become a repulsive thing, the consolation of her visits.
But now it was I who was favored, I was sure of that. How could that Macbeth love her? Nonsense! ”

“ Or else, perhaps, weary with pursuing the fortune he could not seize, Klotz-Lerne had acted of his own free will, and committed a sort of suicide, by exchanging the substance of my uncle for that of a machine.
But why should he not have wished, simply and solely, to become the new beast, foretold by him in a moment of eccentricity—the animal of the future—the ruler of creation, which the re-fitting of its organs was to make immortal and infinitely perfectible, according to his lunatical prophecy? ”

“ Immediately an association of ideas worked in my brain. I remembered the Indian profile of my uncle, the unusual locks of Emma,—those of the madman which are so yellow, and the green fleece of the rat. Can Lerne be trying to graft hairy scalps on bald scalps? Can that be the enterprise?—and immediately I see that my idea is absurd. Nothing corroborates it, and then (this is a clinching argument) the madman has not been scalped, as in that case his scar would have described a complete circle. Why should he not have gone mad simply through a fall on the back of his head? ”

“ Their ranks separated themselves brutally from one another, like so many categories; the pots stood in military array, and each of them bore a label, which had to do with botany rather than with gardening, and gave evidence rather of science than of art. This circumstance gave one food for meditation. After all, could I admit for a moment that Lerne could possibly do gardening for pleasure?
Prosecuting my researches, I let my charmed eyes wander over all those marvels, incapable in my ignorance of naming any of them. ”

“ From the park there came the powerful aroma of dead leaves. It is infinitely sad! One breathes it in, in the way one listens to a funeral hymn. Crows passed cawing, as they caw when they fly in great numbers from a steeple. The approach of evening darkened the day.
I examined the room; for I felt I must look anywhere but at the dead.
Over the writing-desk was a drawing in chalk, which represented my Aunt Lidivine, smiling. It is wrong to make portraits smile! ”

“ They might make you repent of your acts, if you transgressed the rule I am laying down for you—cruelly repent—more cruelly than you imagine. So practice indifference, my dear nephew. See nothing, hear nothing, understand nothing, in order that you may become very, very rich—and remain alive!”
“Oh, indifference is not so easy a virtue at Fonval. There have been things going about here since last night which should not be here and only find themselves here through some bit of carelessness.”
At those words an unexpected rage seized Lerne. He flung out his fists and growled: “Wilhelm! Fool! Ass!” ”

“ Emma had apparently been undergoing one of those sharp lectures that Lerne distributed so prodigally. Her frightened expression showed that. She had not even the courage to make the conventional grimace usual in cases of constrained amiability, and merely made an awkward sort of bow.
As for me, after bowing, I dared not raise my eyes for fear my uncle should read my soul in them.
My soul? If by soul one means (as is generally meant) that ensemble of faculties which result in man’s being a little above the other animals, I think I had better not compromise my soul in this matter. ”

“ I have often played, you know, on its lawns and among the branches of its trees; it’s a godfather that has dandled me on its knee—like—like you, uncle.”
“Yes, yes,” said Lerne evasively. “All the same you will soon have had enough of it.”
“Not at all. The park of Fonval is my earthly paradise.”
“There you are right. It’s just that,” he said laughingly, “the forbidden tree grows in its inclosure. Every hour you will come up against the Tree of Life, and the Tree of Knowledge which you must not touch. It’s dangerous. In your position I should go out for a run in your mechanical carriage. ”

“ At the moment of his apparent death, Klotz-Lerne had doubtless indulged in an experiment on the car, recalling that of the poplar tree, but having been absent-minded for some weeks, perhaps [290] he had not foreseen (fatal want of logic) , that his soul would slip entirely into that empty receptacle, and that the “attachment” being broken, his human form would be no more than a corpse, into which the laws of his own discovery forbade him to return. ”

“ There was no one in the drawing-room—unless shades are people. O little black velvet armchair with your two yellow tassels, hideous piece of squat puffiness, so well termed a crapaud, could I behold you again as of yore without imagining [59] seated on your toad-like form the shade of my anecdotal aunt? And you, my mother’s chair—an austerer one, and one I cannot jest about—will she not always be in my memory leaning over your back as long as you shall be an armchair, if indeed you ever really were one? ”

“ I could not understand how Lerne could do such a thing—to leave me without warning at the mercy of a stranger.
“‘How do you like me?’ asked Klotz, pressing me against him.
“I have already told you, Nicolas, that he was big and strong. I felt his muscles tighten like a vise.
“‘Well, Emma,’ he went on, ‘you are going to love me to-day, for you will never see me again.’
“I am not a coward. Between you and me, I have been caressed by hands which had just committed murder. I have been made love to in ways that were like murder. ”

“ I had just reached this point in my reverie, when a sort of vague noise arose in the Fonval direction; an ox’s lowing, and something like a dog’s long mournful howl. That was all—and then the sleeping calm returned.
Some minutes elapsed, and next I heard an owl hoot somewhere between myself and the château; another raised its voice not so far away as the first; and then others took flight from places nearer and nearer me, as if the passage of some creature were scaring them. ”

“ Oh, not the Lerne of long ago, the companion of my Aunt Lidivine; no, but he was no longer the grim and bloodthirsty host, who had received me in the manner in which one shows people the door.
When he saw me up and about, my uncle brought Emma in, and said to her in my presence, that I was cured of a passing touch of lunacy, and that she might now adore me as much as she liked.
“For my part,” he continued, “I give up emotions no longer suitable to my age. You shall have Emma. All I ask of you is not to leave me. ”