A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult (40 page)

I had proved the presence of carbon in sulphur; I now had to show that it contained hydrogen and oxygen, for they also must be there. My apparatus was inadequate; I had no money, my hands were black and bleeding, black as was my need, bleeding as was my heart. For during all this time I had been carrying on a correspondence with my wife. I had told her of the success of my chemical experiments and she had replied with bulletins about our daughter, interspersed with warning hints about the futility of my scientific work and the imbecility of throwing away money on such things.

In an attack of righteous indignation, and overwhelmed by a furious desire to do myself an injury, I committed suicide by despatching an infamous, unpardonable letter, casting off wife and child for ever, and giving her to understand that I was 'involved in a new love affair.

My bullet hit the mark and my wife replied by demanding a divorce.

Solitary, guilty of suicide and assassination, my sorrow and anxiety made me forget my crime. No one came to see me, and I could seek out no one, as I had given offence to all. This gave me a feeling of exaltation, of drifting over the surface of a sea, with my anchor weighed but without a sail.

Meanwhile, necessity, in the form of my unpaid rent, made her appearance, interrupted my scientific work and metaphysical speculations, and brought me down to earth once more.

Such was my state as Christmas drew near. I had rather curtly refused an invitation to visit a Scandinavian family, as certain painful irregularities made the atmosphere of their house offensive to me. But in the evening, sitting alone, I regretted what I had done and went there all the same. No sooner were we seated at table than the midnight revels began, with a great deal of noise and unrestrained hilarity among the young artists, who were very much at home in that house. An intimacy that was repulsive to me, gestures and looks, in a word behaviour that was quite out of place in a family circle and caused me indescribable discomfort and depression. In the midst of these saturnalian revels my sadness conjured up before my inward eye my wife's peaceful dwelling. I had a sudden vision of the room, the Christmas tree, the mistletoe, my little daughter, her deserted mother. Pangs of remorse seized me, I stood up, alleged that I was feeling unwell, and departed.

I walked along the horrible Rue de la Gaiete, but the artificial merriment of the crowds there wounded me. Then I went along the silent, gloomy Rue Delambre, a street which, more than any other in that quarter, can make one feel desperate. I turned off into the Boulevard Montparnasse and sank on to a chair outside the Brasserie des Lilas.

For a few moments a glass of good absinthe gave me comfort, but then I was attacked by a party of cocottes and students who flicked me in the face with switches. As if pursued by the furies, I left my absinthe to its fate and hurried off to get myself another at the Cafe Francois Premier in the Boulevard Saint-Michel.

I had only jumped out of the frying-pan into the fire. Another lot of people came hallooing at me, `Hi, hermit,' and I fled back to my house, whipped by Eumenides and escorted and unnerved by the triumphant strains of their mocking song. The idea of a punishment, the consequence of a crime, never occurred to me. The part I was playing to myself was that of the innocent victim of unjust persecution. The unknown Powers were hindering me from carrying on my great work and it was essential to break through this hindrance if the crown of victory were to be won.

I had done wrong, and yet I was right and should be acknowledged right.

I slept ill that Christmas Eve. A cold blast swept over my face repeatedly and from time to time I was awakened by the strains of a Jew's harp.

A growing weakness of body and mind was gradually getting the better of me. My black and bleeding hands made it impossible for me to dress myself neatly. My anxiety on account of the rent I owed never gave me a moment's peace, and I paced up and down the room like a wild animal in a cage. I had given up eating regular meals and my landlord advised me to go to hospital; but this was no solution, as such places are expensive and demand payment in advance.

Then the veins in my arms began to swell, a sure sign of blood-poisoning. This was the final blow, and news of it spread to my fellow countrymen. One evening the kind woman from whose Christmas party I had so rudely and abruptly withdrawn - the very person for whom I had felt such antipathy, whom I had almost despised - sought me out, questioned me, learned of the deep distress in which I found myself, and, with tears in her eyes, tried to make me see that to go to hospital was my only hope.

Judge how forlorn and contrite I felt when my eloquent silence made it plain to her that I was without means. She was filled with compassion at seeing me reduced to such a state of misery. She herself was poor and oppressed by domestic cares and anxieties, but she announced that she would collect money for me among the members of the Scandinavian community and that she would go to see their chaplain.

The woman who had sinned had been merciful to the man who had just abandoned his truly wedded wife.

Once more reduced to beggary and appealing for charity through the agency of a woman, I began to suspect the existence of an unseen hand which was responsible for the irresistible logic of events. I bent before the storm, but was determined to rise again at the first possible moment.

A cab took me to the Hopital de Saint-Louis. On the way there I got out in the Rue de Rennes and bought two shirts, shrouds for my last hour!

The idea that my death was imminent obsessed me. I cannot explain why.

I was accepted as a patient and I was forbidden to go out unless I had obtained permission. My hands were swathed in bandages so that any sort of occupation was out of the question. I felt as if I were locked up in a prison.

My room was impersonal, bare, furnished only with absolute necessities, without a trace of beauty, and situated close to the patients' common-room, where people smoked and played cards from morning till night.

The bell sounded for lunch, and at the table I found myself among a company of spectres. Faces like death's-heads, faces of the dying. A nose missing here, an eye there a third with a dangling lip, another with a crumbling cheek Two of the individuals at the table did not look ill at all, but their expression was sullen and despairing. They were master thieves of a good family who, thanks to their powerful relatives, had been let out of prison on the grounds of illness. A nauseating smell of iodine took away my appetite; my bandaged hands obliged me to seek the assistance of my neighbours when I wanted to cut bread or pour myself out a drink. In the midst of this delightful company of criminals and those doomed to die there moved our kind mother, the matron, in her austere habit of black and white, dealing out to each of us his poisonous draught. I toasted a death's-head in a mug of arsenic; he toasted me in digitalis. It was lugubrious and yet one had to be grateful. Grateful, for anything so ordinary and at the same time so offensive!

People dressed and undressed me, tended me like a child. The nun took a special fancy to me, treated me like a baby and called me `my child', while I, like all the others, called her `mother'.

How wonderful it was to use that word `mother', a word that had not crossed my lips for thirty years. This elderly woman, who belonged to the Augustinian Order, wore the garb of the dead because she had never really lived her life. She was gentle as resignation itself, and she taught us to smile at our sufferings as if they had been so many joys, for she knew how salutary pain can be. She never uttered a word of reproach, she never admonished us, she never preached to us. She knew the rule she must obey, that applied in secularized hospitals, and she knew too how to grant small liberties to her patients, though never to herself. For this reason she used to allow me to smoke in my room, even offered to roll the cigarettes for me, an offer I declined. She got me permission to go out at other times than the usual hours and, when she discovered that I busied myself with chemistry, she arranged that I should be introduced to the learned pharmacist in charge of the hospital's dispensary. He lent me books and, after I had acquainted him with my theories on the nature of the elements, he invited me to work in his laboratory. That nun did indeed play a part in my life. I began to be reconciled to my fate and praised the fortunate misfortune that had brought me under that blessed roof.

The first book I borrowed from the pharmacist's library opened of itself and my eye lighted like a falcon on a line in the chapter on phosphorus. In a few words its author described how the chemist Lockyer had shown by spectral analysis that phosphorus was not an elementary substance, adding that an account of the experiment had been handed in to the Acad- emie des Sciences in Paris, which had not rejected his findings.

Feeling encouraged by this unexpected support for my theories, I set off into the city, taking with me my crucibles and what remained of the incompletely burnt sulphur. I handed these over to a firm of analytical chemists, who promised to give me, on the morning of the following day, a certificate of their analysis.

It was my birthday. When I got back to the hospital found awaiting me a letter from my wife in which she mourned my calamities and declared that she wanted to come to me in order to tend me and to love me.

The joy of knowing myself loved in spite of everything made me feel I wanted to express my gratitude, but to whom?

To the Unknown, who for so many years had hidden from me?

My heart melted; I confessed to the base lie about my infidelity, I begged for her forgiveness, and in a trice I was involved in an exchange of love-letters with my own wife though I nevertheless postponed our reunion until a more suitable time.

The next morning I hurried off to my chemist in the Boulevard de Magenta. I carried back with me to the hospital the certificate in its sealed envelope. As I passed the statue of St Louis in the inner courtyard I recalled to mind the Saint's three achievements, the great Asylum for the Blind. L'Hospice des Quinze-Vingts, the Sorbonne, and the Sainte Chapelle, which I interpreted thus: from suffering, through knowledge, to penitence.

In my room, behind the closed door, I opened the envelope that was to decide my future, and I read as follows:

This powder, which has been handed in to us for investigation, has the following characteristics:

Colour: greyish black. Leaves a trace on paper.

Density: considerable, greater than the medium density of graphite; the substance appears to be hard graphite.

Chemical analysis:

This powder burns easily and in burning gives off carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. That is to say, it contains carbon.

So pure sulphur contains carbon!

I was saved. From this moment I should be able to prove to my friends and relations that I was not mad. This would confirm the theories I had advanced in my work Antibarbarus, published a year before, which had been treated by the newspapers as the work of a charlatan or a madman, with the result that I had been cast off by my family as a good-for-nothing, a sort of Cagliostro.

Ha ha, thought I, now you are crushed, my worthy opponents! My whole- self swelled with righteous pride. I wanted to go into the city to cry aloud in the streets, roar in front of the Institut, tear down the Sorbonne, but my hands were still bandaged, and when I got out into the courtyard its tall railings counselled me to have patience.

The hospital's pharmacist, to whom I had communicated the results of the analysis, proposed that he should call together a committee before whom I might demonstrate my thesis by an experiment on the spot.

In the meantime, rather than do nothing, and aware too of my timidity when compelled to make a public appearance, I put together an article on the subject and sent it to Le Temps, where it was published within two days.

The password had been given. I had answers from various quarters, but no one denied the validity of my claims. I gained adherents. I was urged to send the article to a chemical periodical and became involved in a correspondence that stimulated .me to press on with the investigations I was pursuing.

One Sunday, the last that I spent in Saint-Louis, that place of purgatory, I was sitting at the window watching what was going on in the courtyard below. The two thieves were walking about with their wives and children, kissing them from time to time, and looking so happy as they warmed themselves at the flame of love that their misfortunes had only served to fan.

My own loneliness weighed heavily upon me, I cursed my fate. I thought it unjust because I had forgotten that my crime far exceeded theirs in baseness.

The postman arrived with a letter from my wife. It was cold and frigid. My success had wounded her and she pretended to base her scepticism on the opinion of a professional chemist. She added her advice on the perils of illusions that might lead to a mental breakdown. For that matter, what did I expect to gain by all this? Could I support a family by my chemistry?

The same alternatives again - love or knowledge. I did not hesitate, I struck her down with a final letter of farewell and felt as pleased with myself as a murderer who has dealt his blow successfully.

In the evening I took a walk in that gloomy part of the city I crossed the Canal St Martin, black as a grave, a most suitable place for drowning oneself in. I stopped at the corner of the Rue Alibert. Why Alibert? Who was he? Wasn't the graphite that the analytical chemist had found in my sample of sulphur called Alibert graphite? What did that imply? It was odd, but I could not rid my mind of the impression that there was something inexplicable about this. Next the Rue Dieu. Why God, when the Republic has abolished him and is devoting the Pantheon to a new purpose? Rue Beaurepaire. The delightful retreat of malefactors! Rue de Bondy. Was I being led by the devil? I gave up reading the names of the streets, got lost, retraced my steps, but still could not find my way, and finally recoiled before an enormous shed that stank of raw meat and mouldy vegetables, especially sauerkraut. Suspicious-looking persons brushed past me, shouting out coarse words as they did so. Fear of the unknown gripped me. I turned first to the right, then to the left, and stumbled into a sordid blind alley that seemed to be the abode of human trash, vice, and crime. Prostitutes barred my way, street arabs jeered at me. The scene from the night of the Christmas party was repeated, Vae soli! Who was it who was setting these ambushes for me the instant I detached myself from the world and from people? There was someone who had caused me to fall into this trap. Where was he to be found, that I might wrestle with him?