On returning to his room Saniel was very much cast down, and without lighting a candle, he threw himself on the divan, where he remained prostrated.
The frightful part of the affair was the rapidity with which he condemned this poor woman to death, and without hesitation executed her. To save himself she must die; she should die. This time the idea did not turn and deviate as in Caffie’s case. Is it not true then, that it is the first crime that costs, and in the path that he had entered, would he go on to the end sowing corpses behind him?
A shudder shook him from head to foot as he thought that this victim might not be the last that his safety demanded. When she threatened to warn the judge, he only saw a threat; if she spoke he was lost; he had closed her mouth. But had not this mouth opened before he closed it? Had she not already spoken? Before deciding on this interview she may have told all to some one of her friends, who, between the time of his departure with Balzajette and his return, might have visited her, or to some one for whom she had sent for advice. In that case, those also were condemned to death.
A useless crime, or a series of crimes?
The horror that rose within him was so strong that he thought of running to the Rue Sainte-Anne; he would awake the sleeping household, open the doors, break the windows, and save her. But between his departure and this moment the carbonic acid and the oxide of carbon had had time to produce asphyxiation, and certainly he would arrive after her death; or, if he found her still living, some one would discover that the draught of the stove had been turned, and seeing it, he would betray himself as surely as by an avowal.
After all, the maid might have discovered that the draught was turned, and in that case she was saved and he was lost. Chance would decide between them.
There are moments when a shipwrecked man, tired of swimming, not knowing to which side to direct his course, without light, without guide, at the end of strength and hope, floats on his back and lets himself be tossed by the waves, to rest and wait for light. This was his case; he could do nothing but wait.
He would not commit the insane folly of wishing to see and know, as in Caffie’s case; he would know the result soon enough, too soon.
Rising, he lighted a candle, and paced up and down his apartment like a caged animal. Then it occurred to him that those underneath would hear his steps; doubtless they would remark this agitated march, would be surprised, and would ask an explanation. In his position he must take care not to give cause for any remark that could not be explained. He took off his boots and continued his walk.
But why had she spoken to him of double weatherstrips at the doors and windows, of hangings on the walls, of thick curtains? It was she who thus suggested to him the idea of the draught of the stove, which would not have come to him spontaneously.
The night passed in such agitating thoughts; at times the hours seemed to stand still, and again they flew with astounding rapidity. One moment the perspiration fell from his forehead on his hands; at another he felt frozen.
When his windows grew light with the dawn, he threw himself prostrated and shuddering on the divan, and leaning on a cushion he detected the odor of Phillis; burying his head in it he remained motionless and slept.
A ring of the bell woke him, horrified, frightened; he did not know where he was. It was broad daylight, carriages rumbled through the street. A second ring sounded stronger, more violent. Shivering, he went to open the door, and recognized the maid who the previous evening brought a note from Madame Dammauville. He did not need to question her: fate was on his side. His eyes became dim; without seeing her he heard the maid explain why she had come.
She had been to Monsieur Balzajette; he was in the country. Her mistress was nearly cold in her bed; she neither spoke nor breathed, yet her face was pink.
“I will go with you.”
He did not need to learn more. That rosy color, which has been observed in those asphyxiated by oxide of carbon, decided it. However, he questioned the maid.
Nothing had occurred; she had talked with the cook in the kitchen, who, near midnight, went to her room in the fifth story, and then she went to bed in a small room contiguous to that of her mistress. During the night she heard nothing; in the morning she found her mistress in the state she mentioned, and immediately went for Monsieur Balzajette.
Continuing his questions, Saniel asked her what Madame Dammauville did after the consultation with Monsieur Balzajette.
“She dined as usual, but less than usual, eating almost nothing; then she received a visit from one of her friends, who remained only a few minutes, before starting on a voyage.”
This was what he dreaded: Madame Dammauville might have told this friend. If this were so, his crime would be of no use to him; where would it carry him?
After a few moments, and in a tone that he tried to render indifferent, he asked the name of this friend.
“A friend of her youth, Madame Thezard, living at No. 9, in the Rue des Capucines, the wife of a consul.”
Until he reached the house in the Rue Sainte-Anne he repeated this name and address to himself, which he could not write down, and which he must not forget, for it was from there now that the danger would come if Madame Dammauville had spoken.
For a long time he had been habituated to the sight of death, but when he found himself in the presence of this woman stretched on her bed as if she slept, a shiver seized him.
“Give me a mirror and a candle,” he said to the maid and the cook who stood at the door, not daring to enter.
While they went in search of these things he walked over to the stove; the draught remained as he had turned it on the previous evening; he opened it and returned to the bed.
His examination was not long; she had succumbed to asphyxiation caused by the gas from the charcoal. Did it proceed from the construction of the stove, or from a defect in the chimney? The inquest would decide this; as for him, he could only prove the death.
On leaving him the evening before, Phillis, uneasy, told him that she would come early in the morning to know what Madame Dammauville wished. When he told her she was dead she was prostrated with despair; in that case Florentin was lost. He tried to reassure her, but without success.
Nougarede, also, was in despair, and regretted that he had not proceeded otherwise. And he tried to reassure Phillis; the prosecution rested on the button and the struggle that had torn it off. Saniel would destroy this hypothesis; he counted on him.
Saniel became, then, as he had been before the intervention of Madame Dammauville, the only hope of Phillis and her mother, and to encourage them he exaggerated the influence that his testimony would have.
“When I shall have demonstrated that there was no struggle, the hypothesis of the torn button will crumble by itself.”
“And if it is sustained, how and with what shall we overthrow it?”
If he had appeared as usual, she would have shared the confidence with which he tried to inspire her; but since the death of Madame Dammauville he was so changed, that she could not help being uneasy. Evidently it was Madame Dammauville’s death that made him so gloomy and irritable that he would submit to no opposition. He saw the dangers of the situation that this death created for Florentin, and with his usual generosity he reproached himself for not having consented to take care of her sooner; he would have saved her, certainly, as he had begun by demanding the removal of the stove, and Florentin would have been saved also.
The day of the trial arrived without a word from Madame Thezard, which proved that Madame Dammauville had said nothing to her friend. It was six months since the assassination occurred, and the affair had lost all interest for the Parisian public; in the provinces it was still spoken of, but at Paris it was a thing of the past. There is no romance about a clerk who cuts the throat of his employer to rob him; there is no woman in the case, no mystery.
Saniel preferred that Phillis should remain at home with her mother, but in spite of his wishes and prayers she insisted on going to court. She must be there so that Florentin would see her and take courage; he would defend himself better if she were there.
He defended himself badly, or at least indifferently, like a man who gives up because he knows beforehand that whatever he may say will be useless.
Until Saniel’s deposition the witnesses who testified were insignificant enough, and revealed nothing that was not already known; only Valerius, with his pretensions to a professional secret, which he developed slowly, amused the audience. This deposition Saniel made brief and exact, contenting himself with repeating his report. But then Nougarede rose, and begged the president to ask the witness to explain the struggle which should have taken place between the victim and his assassin; and the president, who had commenced by arguing, before the insistence of the defence, decided to ask this question. Then Saniel slowly explained how the position of the body in the armchair and his condition were scientific proof that there was no struggle.
“This is an opinion,” said the president dryly; “the jury will appreciate it.”
“Perfectly,” replied Nougarede, “and I intend to make the jury feel the weight that it carries on the authority of him who formulated it.”
This phrase for effect was destined to invalidate in advance the contradictions that the prosecution would, he believed, raise against the testimony; but nothing of the kind occurred, and Saniel could go and take his place beside Phillis without being called to the bar to sustain his opinion against a physician whose scientific authority would be opposed to his.
In default of Madame Dammauville, Nougarede had summoned the concierge of Rue Sainte-Anne, as well as the maid and the cook, who had heard their mistress say that the man who drew Caffies curtains did not resemble Florentin’s portrait; but this was only gossip repeated by persons of no importance, who could not produce the effect of the ‘coup de theatre’ on which he had based his defence.
When the advocate-general pronounced his address, it was evident why Saniel’s opinion on the absence of a struggle was not contradicted. Although the prosecution believed in this struggle, it wished to abandon it a moment, having no need of this hypothesis to prove that the button had not been torn off on falling from a ladder; it had been done in the act of assassination, in the effort made to cut the throat of the victim who had violently extended the right arm, and, by the shock to the suspenders, the button was torn off. The effect of Saniel’s deposition was destroyed, and that one produced by the testimony of Madame Dammauville’s maids, far less strong, was also destroyed when the advocate-general proved that this gossip turned against the accused. She had seen, it was said, a man with long hair and curled beard, draw the curtains; very well! Does this description apply to the accused? To tell the truth, it was said that she did not recognize him in a portrait published by an illustrated paper. Well, it was because this portrait did not resemble him. Besides, was it possible to admit that a woman of Madame Dammauville’s character would not have informed the judge if she believed her testimony important and decisive? The proof that she considered it insignificant was the fact that she had kept silent.
Nougarede’s eloquent appeal did not destroy these two arguments, any more than it effaced the impression produced by the money-lender relative to the theft of forty-five francs. The jury brought in a verdict of “Guilty,” but without premeditation, and admitting extenuating circumstances.
On hearing the decree that condemned Florentin to twenty years of forced labor, Phillis, half suffocated, clung to Saniel’s arm; but he could not give her the attention he wished, for Brigard, who came to the trial to assist at the triumph of his disciple, accosted him.
“Receive my felicitations for your deposition, my dear friend; it is an act of courage that does you honor. If this poor boy could have been saved, it would have been by you; you may well say you are the man of conscience.”
During the first years of his sojourn in Paris, Saniel had published in a Latin Quarter review an article on the “Pharmacy of Shakespeare”—the poison of Hamlet, and of Romeo and Juliet; and although since his choice of medicine he read but little besides books of science, at that time he was obliged to study the plays of his author. From this study there lingered in his memory a phrase that for ten years had not risen to his lips, and which all at once forced itself uppermost in his mind with exasperating persistency. It was the words of Macbeth:
“Macbeth does murder sleep, the innocent sleep;
Sleep, that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds.”
He also had lost it, “the innocent sleep, sore labor’s bath, balm of hurt minds.” He had never been a great sleeper; at least he had accustomed himself to the habit, hard at first, of passing only a few hours in bed. But he employed these few hours well, sleeping as the weary sleep, hands clenched, without dreaming, waking, or moving; and the thought that occupied his mind in the evening was with him on waking in the morning, not having been put to flight by others, any more than by dreams.
After Caffie’s death this tranquil and refreshing sleep continued the same; but suddenly, after Madame Dammauville’s death, it became broken.
At first it did not bother him. He did not sleep, so much the better! He would work more. But one can no more work all the time than one can live without eating. Saniel knew better than any one that the life of every organ is composed of alternate periods of repose and activity, and he did not suppose that he would be able to work indefinitely without sleep. He only hoped that after some days of twenty hours of work daily, overcome by fatigue, he would have, in spite of everything, four hours of solid sleep, that Shakespeare called “sore labor’s bath.”
He had not had these four hours, and the law that every state of prolonged excitement brings exhaustion that should be refreshed by a functional rest, was proved false in his case. After a hard day’s work he would go to bed at one o’clock in the morning and would go to sleep immediately. But very soon he awoke with a start, suffocating, covered with perspiration, in a state of extreme anxiety, his mind agitated by hallucinations of which he could not rid himself all at once. If he did not wake suddenly, he dreamed frightful dreams, always of Madame Dammauville or Caffie. Was it not curious that Caffie, who until then had been completely effaced from his memory, was resuscitated by Madame Dammauville in the night, ghost of the darkness that the daylight dissipated?
Believing that one of the causes of these dreams was the excitement of the brain, occasioned by excessive work at the hour when he should not exercise it, but on the contrary should allow it to rest, he decided to change a plan which produced so little success. Instead of intellectual work he would engage in physical exercise, which, by exhausting his muscular functions, would procure him the sleep of the laboring class; and as he could not roll a wheelbarrow nor chop wood, every evening after dinner he walked seven or eight miles rapidly.
Physical work succeeded no better than intellectual; he endured the fatigue of butchers and wood-choppers, but he did not obtain their sleep. Decidedly, bodily fatigue was worth no more than that of the brain. It was worth even less. At his table, plunged in his books, or in his laboratory over his microscope, he absorbed himself in his work, and, by the force of a will that had been long exercised and submissive to obedience, he was able to keep his thoughts on the subject in hand, without distraction as without dreams. Time passed. But when walking in the streets of Paris, in the deserted roads on the outskirts, by the Seine or Marne, his mind wandered where it would; it was the mistress, and it always dwelt on Madame Dammauville, Caffie, and Florentin. It seemed as if the heat of walking started his brain. When he returned in this state, after many hours of cerebral excitability, how could he find the tranquil and refreshing sleep, complete and profound, of the laboring classes who work only with their muscles?
Never having been ill, he had never examined nor treated himself: medicine was good for others but useless for him. With a machine organized like his he need fear only accidents, and until now he had been spared them; a true son of peasants, he victoriously resisted Paris life as the destroyer of the intellect. But the time had come to undertake an examination and to try a treatment that would give him rest. He was not a sceptical doctor, and he believed that what he ordered for others was good for himself.
The misfortune was that he could not find in himself any of the causes which resolve into insomnia; he had neither meningitis nor brain fever, nor anything that indicated a cerebral tumor; he was not anaemic; he ate well; he did not suffer with neuralgia, nor with any acute or chronic affection that generally accompanied the absence of sleep; he drank neither tea nor alcohol; and without this state of over-excitement of the encephalic centres, he might have said that he was in good health, a little thin, but that was all.
It was this excitement that he must cure, and as there are many remedies for insomnia, he tried those which, it seemed to him, were suitable to his case; but bromide of potassium, in spite of its hypnotic properties, produced no more effect than the over-working of the brain and body. When he realized this he replaced it with chloral; but chloral, which should create a desire to sleep, after several days had no more effect than the bromide. Then he tried injections of morphine.
It was not without a certain uneasiness that he made this third trial, the first two having met with so little success; and since it is acknowledged that chloral produces a calmer sleep than morphine, it seemed as if the latter would prove as useless as the former. However, he slept without being tormented by dreams or wakings, and the next day he still slept.
But he knew too well the effects produced by a prolonged use of these injections to continue them beyond what was strictly indispensable; he therefore omitted them, and sleep left him.
He tried them again; then, soon, as the small doses lost their efficacy, he gradually increased them. At the end of a certain time what he feared came to pass—his leanness increased; he lost his appetite, his muscular force, and his moral energy; his pale face began to wear the characteristic expression of the morphomaniac.
Then he stopped, frightened.
Should he continue, he would become a morphomaniac in a given time, and the apathy into which he fell prevented him from resisting the desire to absorb new doses of poison, a desire as imperious, as irresistible in morphinism as that of alcohol for the alcoholic, and more terrible in its effects—the perversion of the intellectual faculties, loss of will, of memory, of judgment, paralysis, or the mania that leads to suicide.
If he did not continue, and these sleepless nights or the agitated sleep which maddened him should return, and following them, this over-excitement of the brain in troubling the nutrition of the encephalic mass, it might be the prelude of some grave cerebral affection.
On one side the morphine habit; on the other, dementia from the constant excitement and disorganization of the brain.
Between a fatally certain result and one that was possible he did not hesitate. He must give up morphine, and this choice forced itself upon him with so much more strength, because if morphine assured him sleep at night, it by no means gave him tranquil days—quite the contrary.
He began to use this remedy at night when he fell under the influence of certain ideas; during the day when applying himself to work, by an effort of will he escaped from these ideas, and was the man he had always been, master of his strength and mind. But the action of the morphine rapidly weakened this all-powerful will, so much so, that when these ideas crossed his mind during his working hours he had not the energy to drive them away. He tried to shake them off, but in vain; they would not leave his brain, to which they clung and encompassed it with increasing strength.
Truly, those two corpses troubled him horribly. Was it not exasperating for a man who had seen and dissected so many, that there should be always two before his eyes, even when they were closed—that of this old rascal and of this unfortunate woman? In order not to complicate this impression with another that humiliated him, he got rid of the packages of bank bills taken from Caffie, by sending them “as restitution” to the director of public charities. But this had no appreciable effect.
The thought of Florentin troubled him also; and if he saw Caffie lying in his chair, Madame Dammauville motionless and pink on her bed, to him it was not less cruel to see Florentin between the decks of the vessel that would soon carry him to New Caledonia.
The ideas on conscience that he had expressed at Crozat’s, and those that he explained to Phillis about remorse, were still his; but he was not the less certain that these two dead persons and the condemned one weighed upon him with a terrible weight, frightful, suffocating, like a nightmare. It was not in accordance with his education nor with his environment to have these corpses behind him and this victim before him.
But where his former ideas were overthrown, since these dead bodies seized hold of his life, was in his confidence in his strength.
The strong man that he believed himself, he who follows his ambition regardless of things and of persons, looking only before him and never behind, master of his mind as of his heart and of his arm, was not at all the one that reality revealed.
On the contrary, he had been weak in action and yet weaker afterward.
And it was not only humiliation in the present that he felt in acknowledging this weakness, it was also in uneasiness for the future; for, if he lacked this strength that he attributed to himself before having tested it, he should, if his beliefs were true, succumb some day.
Evidently, if he were perfectly strong he would not have complicated his life with love. The strong walk alone because they need no one. And he needed a woman; and so great was the need that it was through her only, near her, when he looked at her, when he listened to her, that he experienced a little calm.
Was he weak and cowardly on account of this? Perhaps not, but only human.
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