The Napus, page 21
I read in the gazes of the people present that they were all thinking about the Napus, and that the worthy lady and myself had been victims of a common hallucination. That was, in fact, quite plausible—but I was entirely certain, as was the hotel manageress, that there had not been any hallucination: that we had seen, with our own eyes, Levin’s twisted cadaver, and that his remains had been stolen, since aphanasia had never attacked a dead body.
It was in these bizarre conditions that the Geneva police and the judiciary identity service—which is the foremost in the world—made their initial investigations I learned later that discreet but serious inquiries had immediately been made by the Swiss police of my wife, my friends and the Aristotle, as to whether I might be subject to visions or nervous troubles, and whether, since the appearance of the Disease and the first case in the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, I had not been a trifle dotty. I recounted the story of the three rogues I had observed. I was assured that investigations would be made, but I could tell from the tone that scant importance was being attached to my denunciation.
By contrast, Levin’s comrades, friends, niece and nephew—with whom he lived and who were his only family—not to mention the vast public, were convinced that he had been murdered by the Germans, in accordance with his presentiment. That was also the opinion of Maréchal Verve and, in sum, all of the army’s high command. I was told secretly, by an envoy from Minister La Renaudière, that the King did not intend the affair to be hushed up, as so many crimes of the same nature had been in the course of history; that he considered it essential not to give the impression of recoiling before the threats of the unleashed German press, which was already talking about a breach of the armistice; that the necessary money and personnel would be put at my disposal, if the crime really was certain; and that nothing should be neglected in order to make the truth manifest.
Leven’s malaise having appeared at the banquet when the coffee was poured, the first point to establish was whether or not he had drunk the contents of his cup. One of his neighbors at the table was a German woman, the other a Belgian. The Belgian, evidently sincere, affirmed that he had drunk the incriminated beverage, the German, evidently schooled, that he had not. The immediate neighbor of the beautiful German—a Frenchman—could not say whether or not the general had drunk, but he had raised the cup to his lips and then lowered it again.
It was impossible to determine which server had poured the coffee on that side, in view of the rapidity and confusion of the staff, recruited at the last minute. In any case, it still remained for us to prove that the body had been removed from the hotel during my absence and that of the manageress. Now, the floor-waiter and the chambermaid insisted that they had not left the servants’ parlor at the end of the corridor, and had not heard or seen anything suspicious. The elevator-attendant, however, on the other hand, claimed that he had seen two men coming down, at that precise moment, who had not asked for the “lift.” The street was composed of small private houses with gardens, as in every Genevan suburb; no clue came from that direction.
Swiss police cats are justly famous; it was seventy years ago that the first of those animals was revealed, with unexpected success, and climbed up on to a mantelpiece in search of a malefactor’s cap, hidden behind a clock. Since then, the velvet-pawed pursuers have made great progress in the new path and five hundred Raminagrobis25 patrol the streets of the great city night and day, observing, lying in wait and miaowing to attract attention at the first suspect circumstance. In no other place in the world is private and public surveillance exercised as well as in Geneva, thanks to those auxiliaries, a hundred times as skillful and docile as the dogs of old. On the other hand, the exceedingly ingenious and very recent idea of associating them with parrots charged with raising the alarm, had not been successful. The cats had clawed the parrots, which responded with pecks and vociferations, and the burglars made their escape.
Three teams of these highly-reputed animals searched the entire city of Geneva without result. The automatic photographic apparatus that takes silhouettes of passers-by in the less busy streets did reveal the presence of three men at the time I had perceived them, but in an indistinct fashion of no use to the police.
The fact that an occasion like a beauty contest had served to cover up a political assassination was revealing of German psychology. A kind of hypocritical and mocking compassion was observable in the eyes of the Polyplasts in white uniforms. Between them and us the atmosphere had become frosty, and the fragility of the literary and artistic link appeared in the following petty incident.
Thiberaut and Mère Tougourte, who were keen on Franco-German rapprochement, the intellectual fusion of peoples and other insanities, were infatuated with a cousin of Kaninchen’s, who spoke French with a terrible accent. The latter recited entire pages from Thiberaut’s novels and Tougourte’s epistles, calling her “the motern Zévigné”—but when our fashionable couple approached the young and sympathetic Teuton the day after Levin’s death, the latter turned his back on them. He blamed them for the general suspicion.
Henriette, who is very intuitive, had a dream in which she saw Levin’s cadaver fished out of the lake. In view of the dispersal of the conference, terminated in mourning and dread, and the repatriation of the lovely competitors, the police surveillance relaxed and the feline searchers were freed. I persuaded the Genevan chief of police to entrust two of those animals to us, remarkable in that they had been “hydrophilized”—which is to say that the specific horror of water had been quelled in them from birth by means of appropriate aquatic training. They had accompanied the lacustrian brigades during the epidemic of suicide that had ravaged Switzerland and Savoy ten years earlier, after the disappearance of goiter.
I can still recall the names of those intelligent animals—they were called Tiquart and Frôlant—and the vivacity of their yellow eyes. One might have thought that they could talk.
The problem of the human language of animals was, along with that of invisibility, the great preoccupation of the biological scientists and physicists of the year 2100—who, in sum, were no more stupid than us and might perhaps have had more initiative. One also recalls the great controversy over the question of whether or not parrots had inherited a faculty of elocution inculcated into them a thousand years earlier—whether or not their faculty of speech was the consequence of ancient training. Then, without any appreciable reason, the problem, which had seemed so acute and as close to solution as that of invisibility, had faded into the background, ceased to attract attention and had been forgotten.
Human generations are like children, who become passionately interested in an amusement, an object or a task for an hour or a day, and then abruptly stop thinking about it. Most of the time, the loss of attention is proportional to its anterior tension, and as prompt as the other was swift.
Henriette and I, as lovers and recent deserters of research, joined the search, going along the shore of Lake Geneva amid the blue warmth of the commencing afternoon. Tiquart and Frôlant followed us, the former with dark fur, striped like a little tiger, the second more compact and circumspect, with gray fur that had a silky gleam. They knew why we had brought them, and that we were carrying out an important investigation. Gliding along at the same muscular and furtive pace, they exchanged blinks of their gold-encircled green eyes, replete with images of surprise, surveillance, cruelty and pouncing.
Before the first research excursion we had received a telegram from the Aristotle signed by Cortenaz, evidently instructed by La Renaudière, which gave us authorization to remain in Geneva for as long as necessary. “Good, good, that’s all right!” We were both on a mission and in love. Meanwhile, for her part, the lovely and coquettish Madame Cortenaz, already consoled over not having won the prize, was flourishing at some distance from her spouse.
The vaporous and floating azure of the sky was not the same as that of the mountain, seen in oblique perspective, frosted with indigo in the warm light, but the color of the mountain was itself entirely different from that of the water, extended like blue satin cloth and only reflecting the sky and the heights as the splendid midday became distant. They were three blues that opened all the doors of suavity to us at once, as in the immortal sonnet by Keats, but in which, unlike the sonnet, neither the immense sea nor the profundity of a precious stone was evoked.
Accompanied by our small felines, we walked through meadows of delicately tender grass, never trampled, discreetly irrigated: meadows for the feet of elves or Englishwomen—but my eulogy to the latter aggravated Henriette. “Through the conference you only paid attention to Miss Tennhart, and you would have liked her to win the prize. Well, Monsieur, I allowed myself to be courted by the Boche Polyplast Otto 20,014, in his handsome blue uniform.” I did not believe a word of it, knowing her to be faithful and hostile to Germans.
Six months before, such a stroll, if any could have taken place, would have steeped us in various considerations regarding the magnetic centers of the cell or the symptoms of the prenapus. Today, our preoccupations were very different. We enjoyed the expansive, immanent, intense blue—the triple blue of that corner of the Earth, whose equivalent is not found anywhere else, not even in Madame de Staël’s turban, Voltaire’s amethyst or Byron’s passionate gaze.
A modulated miaowing resounded—that of Frôlant, who was going along the edge of the lake. At that appeal, Tiquart came running, and arrived next to his companion with a bound. We drew nearer.
There was an evident disturbance, in that deserted spot, of the water weeds and snaking creepers dangling from the trees on the bank. About two cables out, the emergence of a fragment of gray cloth was perceptible, which appeared at a distance to be part of an elongated parcel.
The two cats came to a stop, purring. Their attitude indicated that their electropsychy—not their sense of smell, which is replaced in that animal by a irritated disgust—had revealed something important. We were immediately convinced that it was the body of the unfortunate Levin.
I went to look for a boatman. After searching for a quarter of an hour I discovered one who was willing to help me. The two of us—Henriette had remained with the cats on the shore—lifted out the floating package, tied up by a broken and fragmented rope, loading it into the small boat and bringing it to shore. There we carefully refrained from touching it.
In spite of its atrocious odor the Swiss and I stayed to guard it. Henriette returned to Geneva. Two hours later—the time of overly long procedural steps—a police commissaire, the head of the identity judiciary and gendarmes arrived, in order to establish that it really was Général Levin, recognizable by his uniform. His face, tumefied by the water, was black.
23. The folklorist Anatole Le Braz (1859-1926), whose collections of Breton songs, tales and legends includes La Légende de la mort en Basse-Bretagne (1893). Daudet wrote a eulogistic obituary of Le Braz in Action Française, which called special attention to that book, presumably while he was in the process of writing the present novel.
24. “Not twice for the same thing”—the legal principle forbidding “double jeopardy.”
25. Raminagrobis first appeared as the name of a cat featured in Jean de La Fontaine’s fable “Le Chat, la belette et le petit lapin” [The Cat, the Weasel and the Little Rabbit]. La Fontaine later attributed it to the Prince of Cats in “Le Vieux chat et la jeune souris” [The Old Cat and the Young Mouse], and it caught on to the extent of becoming a common noun.
CHAPTER NINE
BOCHE WILL BE BOCHE
Popularity, which is the opposite of intimacy, had always been something unenjoyable to me, so I was rather disagreeably surprised, on returning to Geneva with Henriette, to be acclaimed by my fellow citizens. Immediately, however, I realized the effect produced by the discovery of Levin’s cadaver and the manifest proof of his poisoning. The service of France entails much annoyance and even a few risks. Thus Polyplasty had made of me, by virtue of circumstances, a stalwart patriot, and I thought seriously about taking a name like everybody else, instead of my ridiculous number. A traditional and esthetic spirit had done its work within me without my being aware of it.
Numerous comrades from the Aristotle, with Cortenaz and Eustache at the head, were waiting for me when I got down from the train. The lovely Madame Cortenaz embraced the radiant Henriette and presented her with a bouquet. Cortenaz had prepared a little speech, not badly formulated, in truth, in which he developed the idea that, having departed for Geneva in order to crown beauty, I had crowed Justice there. I had a strong desire to reply: “Good, good that’s all right,” but I restrained myself.
The murder of our finest general had produced a considerable emotion in all milieux, and had reawakened national fiber, which had relaxed slightly since the tacit armistice. At first people had believed, naturally, in a misinterpreted Napus. Then, as more news arrived, they had concluded that it was a crime. Now, suspicion of the Germans was such that Ambassador von Tschuppe und Werdenschaft, who had returned to the Rue de Lille—the seat of the embassy since time immemorial—had though it his duty to pay a visit to La Renaudière in order to complain about the perfidy of the Parisian press and what was being said in the street. The step was severely appreciated by the diplomatic corps and the rumor was covertly spread that the British admiralty had secretly given order to the “home fleet” to resume battle dispositions.
Eustache confided to me that a sense of veritable beauty had suddenly taken possession of him, as with all of us, and that he had sold off the paintings, items of furniture and objects of his famous collections, recognized as false, deceptive and hideous. He would only have obtained a derisory sum for them but for an Australian collector who had got it into his head, or had it put into his head, that the heap of rubbish in question was a marvelous opportunity and that Eustache had been afflicted by an acute autodepreciative mania.
“At another time,” Eustache told me, “I would have laughed at that stroke of luck, which prevented my ruin, but I’ve discovered—believe it, my dear friend—that the universal renaissance in art is nothing other than a symptom of the prenapus, the presage of a recrudescence of the plague. No one has listened to me. Cortenaz hasn’t listened to me; you haven’t listened to me; people have continued to manufacture and publish those accursed cinebooks. We’ll learn, and pay dear. I admit that I was convinced of Levin’s aphanasia. When I think that he went to Geneva for a company of cinepublishers—him, a glorious soldier! It required the recovery of the cadaver to convince me of the crime. But tell me a little about the beauty contest. The little Bressane is truly pretty, then?”
Eustache, like many others, had become a bizarre mixture of the serious and the frivolous. The disappearance of mental alienation in its classic forms of revendication, dissimulation, persecution, etc. had doubtless been replaced by a shot of liquefaction of common sense and the immediate manifestations of logic and reason. People ripened in the study of medicine, jurisprudence, taxation, general economics, philosophical and biological criticism, and politics were now exhibiting deplorable lacunae from one week to the next, as if there had been a lapse, not in their memory, which remained intact and precise, but in their judgment. It was impossible to determine whether that was a phenomenon of prenapusian preparation or a ravage of internal dread and perplexity, or a consequence of the Archimedes.
One curious phenomenon was a tendency to gather together in order to take the most trivial decision or assume the slightest responsibility. Everything was a pretext for a conference, for assembly, for negotiation, for collaboration. Even though the Armistice of Beauty, as it was called, was precarious, by virtue of circumstances and the reawakening of the ethnic spite of the Germans, there was nothing to be heard anywhere but hymns to peace and eulogies to peace and its benefits; pacifist and palliative figures of speech; declarations of non-aggression and the renunciation of all offensive intention, of the Archimedes, its ostentations and endeavors; promenades of blue flags—blue being the color of peace—altars to peace, flights of doves, recitations of poems, sonnets and tiercets to peace.
None of those who devoted themselves to these manifestations believed them to be not only vain but a bad omen—for in all epochs they have signified, by antiphrasis, the imminence of war, in the same way that any project of disarmament invariably precedes the taking up of arms. But there was a kind of vogue, a fad, a psittacism and an echolalia, in which the depression of the public spirit appeared, by reason of the collapse of those who should have been guiding it—which is to say, scientists and writers.
The reaction came from the Sovereign, who insisted to the Ministers that an investigation should be opened in Paris, as well as in Geneva, into the circumstances in which Général Levin had been poisoned, and his cadaver removed and thrown into Lake Geneva. I was the principal witness; I was summoned by the Procureur du Roi, who commissioned a very firm examining magistrate by the name of Séchelard to take my deposition.
As I was going to the magistrate’s office I met President Palémon, whom I had not seen since my last visit to the Palais de Justice a few months earlier. He saw me from a distance. “Well,” he shouted to me, “wasn’t I right?”
Then, as I hesitated, he went on: “What, don’t you remember what I said? What is even more dangerous than aphanasia is the simulation of aphanasia. Well, didn’t that hit the bull’s-eye? Wasn’t it spot on? Was I far-sighted? Yes or no?”
Palémon’s vanity and self-contentment were legendary. In this instance, however, he had not been wrong, and I congratulated him without reservation. The more compliments I lavished on him, the more he demanded.
